What You Need to Know About Registering .pt Domains

With a population of around 10.4 million, Portugal represents a solid secondary market for your website. The country isn’t so large that you find yourself bouncing around different demographics trying to work out to whom you must appeal and how. However, the country is still large enough to make expansion into Portugal worthwhile. For that expansion, you’ll need a .pt extension – the official domain extension for Portugal.

How Do You Get a .pt Domain Extension?

It’s fairly straightforward to get a .pt extension, especially when compared to other countries that require you to prove your – or your businesses’ – residence. Portugal doesn’t have any of those residency rules. You can set up a .pt extension from any country in the world with no questions asked, meaning you also don’t have to worry about proxy and trustee services.

However, there are some minor conditions to registering a .pt domain.

Time is one of them. You have to register your .pt domain for at least a year, with no rolling monthly contracts available. If you’re looking to expand your business into Portugal, you have to commit to at least owning the domain – not necessarily operating a website – for a substantial period. Your domain name also has to meet character requirements of two at minimum and 63 at maximum. Those characters can come from the modern Latin alphabet. However, you can also use a select number of international domain name characters that are common in the Portuguese language, including á, à, â, ã, ç, é, ê, í, ó, ô, õ, and ú.

Beyond that, the registration process should come with no hurdles as long as you use an appropriate domain registrar service.

What Are the Reasons for Getting a .pt Domain?

The obvious reason is that you want to expand a business into Portugal but don’t have a Portuguese-focused website with which to do that. However, that doesn’t account for the fact that you can subcategorize your existing site to do that. So, why get a .pt domain name instead of adjusting your existing site structure?

Reason 1 – You Get a Massive Local Boost

Don’t underestimate what merely having .pt on the end of your domain name says to a Portuguese consumer. They’ll make immediate assumptions, primarily that your company is located in Portugal and serves local people. The former may not be true – Portugal doesn’t require local residency for domain registration – but the trust signal is still relevant.

You create a certain “feeling” within your audience when they see your .pt domain extension. They may not know precisely what you do. However, the extension shows then that your site has something to do with Portugal, which makes getting a click more likely.

Reason 2 – High Domain Name Availability

At first glance, Portugal has a high number of domains registered with the .pt extension – a little over 1.933 million. Look beyond that figure and you see that only about a quarter of those domains are still active. The rest are either dead or unused for whatever reason.

That’s excellent news for you because it increases the likelihood that the domain name to which you’ll attach your .pt extension will be available. Even if it isn’t, there’s a three-to-four chance that you may be able to purchase your desired domain name from the current registrant who isn’t using it. If that isn’t an option, you could also wait until that non-active domain becomes available again.

Reason 3 – Enhance Your Brand (Locally and in Search Engines)

The local trust boost that comes with having a .pt domain is enhanced by the branding opportunities it presents. For instance, let’s say you have a .com generic top-level domain extension right now. You can create a Portuguese language subcategory of that extension but your brand will still be in English. With your .pt extension, you can change the name of your brand to Portuguese or use other local terms relevant to your website.

This local brand enhancement follows through to Portuguese search engines, which are more likely to rank .pt domains.

Register Your Portuguese Domain

The three-hit combo of more trust, better branding, and high domain availability makes it clear why registering a .pt domain is such a good idea. Register your .pt extension today – you don’t have to go through a trustee and can register from anywhere in the world.