Managing director John Clifford believes Central Bridging (CBL) will get a significant digital boost thanks to a collaboration with digital marketing agency Oxygen.
Leading specialist finance provider CBL was advised to acquire and then switch to centralbridging.com in a bid to increase its digital footprint.
Currently running off centralbridging.co.uk with pre-reserved rights to the .uk, CBL looked initially to the benefits of transferring to the .uk – but have instead opted to utilise the .com.
Clifford says teaming up with Oxygen (the creative agency behind bridging.com) to make the move was an easy decision to make:
“We were alerted to the opportunity by Oxygen through their brand protection scheme and were keen to take advantage of this opportunity”
“Following advice from Oxygen we were going to switch to .uk in line with the 2019 pre-registration deadline but when they advised us switching to the .com involves the same amount of work we decided to go straight for the .com and roll the changes out over the forthcoming weeks”
Ryan Ewen, commercial director at Oxygen, believes other businesses should take advantage of an easy gain. He said:
“A lot of companies are still running on .co.uk and there are huge SEO gains in switching to the .uk version or better still .com. Having a portfolio of more than 800 domains we have done extensive research across multiple domain names demonstrating that switching from .co.uk to .uk increases visibility by around 40 per cent.
“The gap between .co.uk and .uk is vast and switching is one of the easiest gains also allowing for internationalisation, which is a way of future proofing businesses. If you can acquire the .com version then that is even better.
“Over recent years we have acquired a host of domains as part of our digital strategy to create clarity within the short-term finance market. We are now strongly advising all clients to try to acquire the .uk and if possible the .com version ahead of the pre-registration deadline. They should also try to ensure that sites are run using SSL to protect customers data in line with GDPR.”