Why?

LOC(K) in the location

Firstly, one of the key things that all .tel domains have the ability to provide a location record quickly and simply.  Many small businesses struggle with this when building their own websites.  .tel makes this an extremely simple task.  It then becomes ingrained in the essential information stored in a .tel; the contact information and descriptive content is contextualized also by a location record.  This makes it especially juicy for search engines when looking at relevant content to serve up.

Micro-formatted information

Secondly, as the .tel automatically publishes micro-formats such as hCard which help software to identify labeled content and handle it better, Google can take this location information and the contact and context information and understand its relevance in its entirety.  If a keyword is Silicon Valley and the location record matches, this is relevant and useful information for a local search.

Relevant content for all devices

Thirdly, as a .tel domain is automatically formatted in the right way for every device, it becomes a customer-friendly single point of contact that customers can use to then decide how they interact with the company; it instantly provides customers with a choice of ways of interacting.  This is crucial when exploring new ways of interacting with customers who might want to check in on Foursquare, interact on Twitter or write a review on Qype.  With so many interaction points, a company can remind a customer of all of the places they might be able to interact on a .tel, thus making much better use of those touchpoints from an ROI perspective.

Local in the real world

Finally, a .tel can be used in local outdoor or interactive advertising to bring customers to relevant information, interaction points or offers.  As the .tel can be populated ‘on the fly’ from mobile devices, information can be changed very quickly. Thus, a local offer that is running for one hour only for local shoppers can be switched on and off without any hassle.

One enhancement you might consider if you’re a local business is using TelAds to provide offers and vouchers for your customers.  There’s been an incredible growth in the past couple of years in terms of customers wanting to use coupons to gain great deals.  Many of the services out there today however have too many hidden terms and conditions and leave very little profit left.  Using free third party services to populate your TelAds with time-limited vouchers or offers for first-time customers, will provide you with the ability to drive further revenue.  In 2011, we’ll be making this even easier by providing a special voucher record which you’ll be able to populate from within the control panel.

With the price of a .tel averaging at $15 per year, and the power of instant information at people’s fingertips, customer service and coupon offers, search engine optimization, mobile access from any device and location at the heart of the domain, .tel is a perfect solution for Local Search.

The proof is in the pudding

When we write that .tel is juicy for search engines, it isn’t just wishful thinking, or some kind of sales pitch. Many initiatives at Telnic and independently in the .tel community have repeatedly shown by the numbers that .tel domains are some of the most powerful (and certainly cheapest!) search engine optimization (SEO) you can achieve.

Telnic is currently undergoing a study with a large yellow page provider in the US to look at the value of providing .tel domains to their customers.  Whilst Google has only indexed the .tel domains in the past three weeks, the results have been dramatic.  Both Google and Bing, at the time of writing, are presenting over 50% of the domains indexed in the top 15 results for named search, with 39% of .tel domains being ranked in the first 10 results in Google and 44% of .tel domains being ranked in the first 10 results in Bing.

The speed of indexing and the authority given to such a young extension shows the power of .tel, even without significant SEO attributes such as cross-linking being performed during these tests.  We hope to share more from this and other trials in the coming months.  Do let us know if you’re getting good results as well.