Deciding Between 2 Domains for a Real Estate Website... What is Your Opinion?
-
I own : waterfrontrealestatemiami.com & miamisrealtor.com I am the beginning phases of developing and designing a website for a Realtor within South East Florida (Miami) She specializes in luxury waterfront properties (homes mainly) but does not want to be to limited, as she is open to anything within the area. But the bread and butter is luxury waterfront properties. I am torn between the right domain choice. Any suggestions between the two listed above? Please list why, Thank you for your help.
-
What has worked for my clients in the past, is to have two domains:
(1) the main domain for SEO purposes, controlled in Google Webmaster tools as the primary domain
(2) a shorter marketing domain, that forwards (with masking) to the main domain.. and passes the juice.This way the marketing domain can be shorter, advertised in newspapers,business cards, etc... and can be easily remembered.... and main SEO domain still gets the value of the direct hit traffic.
-
My response is probably the opposite of what most SEOs would say. My husband and I are both realtors and we have a domain that ranks really well in our city. The domain name? Our names.
We don't have any keywords in the domain at all.
Keywords in the domain can help...but they're not as helpful as in the past.
Here are some things to know from the perspective of the realtor:
-You are constantly telling people about your website. It's easy to say, "Go to myname.com". People remember that.
-Similarly, the agent is going to be giving out her email address often. It'll be a pain if she has [email protected] as an email address.
-We get a lot of searches for people who are looking for us by our name. Granted, you'd likely still get those if you crafted your content properly with a keyword domain.
-Think of advertising. If I buy a bus bench ad, I don't want to have to put on the ad, "VISIT BESTHOMESINMYCITYFORSALE.COM" No one's going to remember that.
-Does your realtor sell more than just waterfront homes? IMHO you're limiting her if you put all of her business on a site about waterfront homes.
A tip: keep an eye on snapnames.com or namejet.com. Sometimes real estate related domains come up that you can get for a really good price. Once we already had our domain with our name in it, one came up for "[city]homes.com". It had a good backlink profile. Plus, one of the top realtors in the city who advertises a lot on the radio has [city]homes.ca. We purchased [city]homes.com and redirected it to our site and now we have an even nicer backlink profile, plus we get type in traffic.
-
Kind of long however if you get 3 leads from here a month and close 4 houses a year that is a pretty high ROI... These houses are multi million each if I am not mistaking.
Its not about the quantity of leads in this case it is more about the value of each lead. There are 28 searches a month which is 336 per year. If you can close 1% of this it's a great amount of money... Correct?
-
I really appreciate your advice. Thank you. so something like
Name+1KW.com would be best in your opinion?
-
Although it is good to have the keywords in the domain name, if you need to go with something like miamiwaterfronthomesFL.com or something that is difficult to tell someone in the elevator then you are better to go with a brand name and try to get one keyword in like BRANDrealtor.com.
Also, having a spammy looking name means less credibility and people will be less likely to click on your search result because they will think it's some cheezy affiliate site built for SEO and not a real legit company.
Usability comes before SEO especially when naming your site, plus once you name a site you are married to it so choose wisely and make it something you wouldn't be embarrassed to put on a business card or tell someone.
-
How about "waterfronthomesmiami.com" She uses her first and last name currently. I have been all over pool.co, and snapnames.com trying to get better URL's very difficult and costly. Any suggestions? It is a VERY competitive market. in South Florida, this is why I would like to go with the KW rich URL and some vanity URL.
-
neither are good in my opinion, the first is impossible to remember and the second has a S in the middle. Keep digging IMO.
Does she have a business name, might be better to go the brand name route.
-
What do you think of WATERFRONTHOMESMIAMI.com slightly better...?
-
I was able to get WATERFRONTHOMESMIAMI.com
-
Taken... waterfrontmiami.com
-
It looks like a potential competitor already owns: miamiwaterfront.com
However: waterfrontmiami.com is available. 6,600 local monthly searches, but only medium competition. I would buy it.
-
The idea is to use the MiamisRealtor.com as the vanity and WaterfrontRealEstateMiami.com as the KW / SEO oriented domain.
-
My concern with the shorter name is that people might easily miss the S. That is when branded domains perform better.
I don't know the US realtor market well, but I assume this domain will end up plastered over boards outside properties. If that is the case then there is a pretty strong argument for a branded domain rather than a kw led one.
-
You are searching on a broad scale.If you look to the left of the adwords tool, check the box that says [exact] the search volume for this exact phrase is 16
-
I see your point... but the key phrase "waterfront real estate miami"
From Adwords tool
Competition = HIGH
GMS = 880
LMS = 720
Does have potential, I agree that the name MiamisRealtor is easier but that can always be the vanity URL.... What do you think?
-
Miamisrealtor is shorter and easier to remember. (If you do some keyword research you will find that both: "Miamis realtor" and "Water front real estate miami" have barely any search volume https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS)Having a URL that your customers can remember and wont have problems typing is better in this case.
Exact domain are best however they are only best if there is traffic for the term.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle multiple domains?
Hello, We are working on migrating a website to a new web server. In addition to the primary website domain, there are several other variations that are owned. Is okay if we point all of our domains to the same IP address as our primary domain, and then setup 301 redirects to the primary domain? Are there any risks in doing this? There may be about 100 domains. Many of them are different country TLD for same primary .com domain, others including misspellings of primary .com, and some that are not so related to primary domain. Thank you in advance for your response!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello1 -
Linking to External Websites?
Is it good to link external websites from every page. Since, the on-page grader shows there should be one link pointing to an external source. I have a website that can point to an external website from every page using the brand name of the specific site like deal sites do have. Is it worth having external link on every page, of-course with a no-follow tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Should I NoFollow Links Between Our Company Websites?
The company I work for owns and operates hundreds of websites throughout the United States. Each of these is tied to a legitimate local business many times with specific regional branding and mostly unique content. All of our domains are in pretty good shape and have not ever participated in any shady link building/SEO. These sites currently are often linking together between the other sites within their market. It makes perfect sense from a user standpoint since they would have an interest in each of the sites if they were interested in the specific offering that business had. My question is whether or not we should nofollow the links to our other sites. Nothing has happened from Google in terms of penalties and they don't seem to be hurting our sites now as they are all currently followed, but I also don't want to be on the false positive side of any future algorithm updates surrounding link quality. What do you think? Keep them followed or introduce nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Sub domain on root domain
Hello,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dror999
I have a question that I can't find a good answer on.
I have a site, actually a "portal"/ "directory" for service providers.
Now, for start, we opened every service provider own page on our site, but now we get a lot of applications from those providers that thy want sites from their own.
We want to make every service provider his own site, but on sub domain url. ( they don’t mind… its ok for them)
So, my site is www.exaple.com
There site will be: provider.exaple.com
Now I have two questions:
1. can it harm my site in SEO?
2. if one from those sub domain , punished by google because is owner do "black hat seo" , how it will affect the rood domin? It can make the root domain to get punished?
Thanks!!0 -
If other websites implement our RSS feed sidewide on there website, can that hurt our own website?
Think about the switching anchors from the backlinks and the 100s of sidewide inlinks... I gues Google will understand that it's just a RSS feed right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Age of a re-directed domain same as age of a static domain?
I know domain age plays a role in SEO--but, I am wondering if a domain is set up to 301 re-direct to another domain if it builds the same amount of authority over time as the static domain--just looking at age as a ranking factor, not links accumulated over time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Where do I redirect a domain to strengthen another domain?
I've got a UK domain that I need to redirect to a US domain. Should I point it to the root domain or a landing page off the root and what it the benefit to doing one over the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCorp0