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 name@longkeywordrichdomainname.com 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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Website cache has removed
Hi Team, I am facing an issue with cache of the website, despite various r&d I couldn't able to find the solution as code seems to be ok to me. Can any one of you check and let me know why home page and some of the product pages removed from the caching. See here: https://bit.ly/2Kna3PD Appreciate a quick response! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Domain Factors
Now that Page Rank seems to have been 'put out to graze' by Google with no further PR update planned, what would you say is the 'main factor' when looking at a domain? Is it Moz DA? or Moz Links? or Majestic TrustFlow? Or none of the above or is it a combination of the above?! Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Same Branding, Same Followers, New Domain After Penalty... Your Opinion Please
I know I've asked a similar question in the past but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my website. I've got a website at thewebhostinghero.com that's been penalized by both Panda and Penguin. I cleaned up the link profile and submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I finally found a handful of additional bad links and I submitted a new disavow + reconsideration request a few days ago and I am still waiting. That said, after submitting the initial disavow request, the traffic has completely gone and while I expected a drop in traffic, I also expected my penalty to be lifted but it was not the case. Even though the penalty might be lifted this time, I think that making the website profitable again could be harder than creating a new website. So here's my questioning: The website's domain is thewebhostinghero.com but I also happen to own webhostinghero.com which I bought later for $5000 (yes you read that right). The domain "webhostinghero.com" is completely clean as it's only redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. I would like to use webhostinghero.com as a completely new website and not redirect any traffic from thewebhostinghero.com as to not pass any bad link juice. Pros: Keeping the same branding image (which cost me $$$) Keeping the 17,000+ Facebook followers Keeping the same Google+ and Twitter accounts Keeping and monetizing a domain that cost me $5000 webhostinghero.com is a better domain than thewebhostinghero.com Cons: Will create confusion between the 2 websites Any danger of being flagged as duplicate or something? Do you see any other potential issues with this? What's your opinion/advice? P.S. Sorry for my english...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code?
Can anyone tell me if this website was built with Frontpage or another cookie cutter drag and drop website creator by looking at the source code? http://naturespremiumpestdefense.com/ Thanks, Russell
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ULTRASEM0 -
Links on My website
I am looking to create some more trust on my website by subscribing to BBB. I have heard that my site is penalized and loses "link juice" if I place the BBB logo link in my page footer on every page of my website. Does anyone know how much I am penalized? Should I only put it on my conversion pages and maybe my main 10 sub pages? My main goal is to assist in getting conversions but I don't want to do it at the expense of getting a penalty. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Parameters when deciding how to set up cross domain analytics?
Hi, I am planning on setting up cross domain analytics for my website. I have found lots of sources about the code to use, but haven't been able to find something about what parameters to consider. Would appreciate my fellow mozzers helping me to put together a list of all the variations of elements I may want to track to ensure I am setting it up correctly. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Root domain or sub domain? WWW. or NOT WWW......
I am a little confused! I use vidahost whom I have to say I find very helpful. I currently have the domains www.fentonit.co.uk and www.fentonit.com, now the websites was set up using the www.fentonit.com and I have www.fentonit.co.uk as a parked domain pointed to the www.fentonit.com. Confused yet? Now because I wanted the website to show www.fentonit.co.uk I added some code I was given by the guys to the .hta access file and viola up it comes as the .co.uk which is what I wanted. So if your still here and havent A: Killed yourself yet or B: Went to the Pub Then my questions are: 1. Is there going to be an issue from an SEO point of view having my site set up this way and if so how do I resolve it? 2. Would I be better using the root domain fentonit.co.uk (I think this is the root domain, although it iscurrently parked and pointed) as opposed to the sub www domain?.......and finally.......? 3. If it is set up as I stated what exactly would be my root domain, would it be the .co.uk or the .com? Sorry and I completely understand if your not interested in answering it but if you do.....Thanks in advance and I'll take you to the pub...lol Craig www.fentonit.co.uk ( i think)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigyboy1