Should you put your city in your domain name?

GoDaddy, Shopify, Namecheap and Network Solutions all give local businesses the same advice, which is to put your city in the domain. It is good advice, and for most trades it is impossible to follow.

On 8 September 2026 we checked nine common trades — roofing, plumbing, electrical, hvac, landscaping, painting, flooring, paving, concrete — against the twelve US cities over a million people and fifteen more between 250,000 and 500,000. That is 243 domains. Every one was registered.

Is your city plus trade .com available? Not in a big city

houstonroofing.com, chicagoroofing.com, dallasroofing.com, newyorkroofing.com and the other eight are all taken, and the same holds along every one of those nine rows.

The bottom three rows are the same construction on the same day. chicagoroofing.com is gone and chicagoductwork.com is free. losangeleshardscaping.com is gone and austinhardscaping.com is free. Nothing about the city changed.

Does a smaller town help?

For four of the nine trades, yes, and by a lot. Drop from cities of a quarter of a million to towns of fifty to a hundred thousand and electrical goes from 0/15 to 10/15, flooring and paving to 8/15, painting to 7/15.

For the other five it changes nothing. plumbing is still 0/15 in that band, and roofing and concrete are 1/15. Shrinking the town by a factor of five does not touch them, because there is a plumber in every town and there has been one for as long as the domain has been worth registering.

Size is the weaker of the two variables; the trade is what decides.

Which trades still have room, and which don't

Here is the whole list, so you can find your own.

33 of the 45 came back at 3/15 or worse, and 19 came back at zero. That has more to do with the number of roofers in the United States, and how long they have had websites, than with anything about .com.

The top of the table is the useful part. plastering is untouched at 15/15 while drywall, the same wall finished a different way, is 3/15. tiling is 14/15 and flooring is 0/15. The work is much the same either way; flooring is just the word more businesses chose to put on the van.

Try the job title, not the trade

The cheapest thing to test, and almost nobody does it, is swapping the trade noun for the plural job title.

texasdrywallers.com, virginiawelders.com, georgiahandymen.com, illinoisexcavators.com and michiganinsulators.com were all unregistered on 8 September 2026, while the trade-noun version of each was gone.

The bottom four rows are the honest half. For the largest trades the rename buys nothing: every form of roofing and plumbing and moving is taken. It works in the middle of the table, where enough businesses exist for the plural to read as a name and not enough for anyone to have bothered registering both forms.

The word isn't gone, the pairing is

roofing scores 0/15 after a state name. Crossed with ordinary brand words instead, in the shape of roofinginstinct.com or roofinganvil.com, the same list of trades is 93% available.

The trade word has plenty of room. What has no room is the exact construction every registrar recommends, because it is the one every business in that trade tried first. Place name plus trade is not a naming idea. It is a queue, and you are not near the front of it.

What to do when your city plus trade .com is taken

In the order that costs least:

1. Try the job title. insulators over insulation, drywallers over drywall. Free ten to fifteen times out of fifteen where the noun was free none. One extra check.
2. Name the service, not the category. ductwork is 15/15 against states where hvac is 0/15, and a duct company that says ductwork is being more accurate anyway.
3. Go smaller than the metro. The 50,000-to-100,000 band freed up four of the nine trades that were locked in every larger city. Counties and neighborhoods are the obvious next step down and we did not test them, so treat that as untested rather than as advice.
4. Drop the place and use a real name. 93% of trade-plus-brand-word combinations were free on the same day. roofinganvil.com is a worse SEO story and a better business name, and you can have it.
5. Check them together rather than one at a time. Every number above came out of crossing two lists and checking the whole grid. Four thousand combinations take about as long to check as one, and none of these results would have been predictable without doing it.

If you want the grid rather than the argument, the pattern below is the one this piece measured. US states crossed with trade names on .com, checked live. The same question for two-word brandable names is a different answer, and a more encouraging one.