SEO domain strategy: Do country-specific domains lead to higher rankings? seoexamples.com

Do local domains rank better than .com domains in foreign markets?
Google’s Gary Illyes famously answered:
”In general, local domains perform better because Google prefers content that is locally relevant.”
Is Gary right? We’ve analyzed 3’200 search results in Switzerland to find out.

Our findings:

🌍 Non-local domains dominate the search results, especially for knowledge-based keywords.

💰 However, for transactional keywords, .ch domains completely dominate the top 10 positions!

💡 And they require on average 25% lower domain ratings to rank well for the same keywords!