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
-
How to build Domain Authority?
My site: https://www.fishingspots.com.au/ has started to drop Domain Authority in the past weeks, however less quality sites like http://silverstories.com.au/ are rising... I am not sure why? Is there someway I can understand why my site would suddenly start dropping authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
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 -
Tips do join 2 domains
I would like to move all my old domain content ( dicasdogoogle.com.br) with more than 1200 tutorials pages to a new one (seomartin.com)... and then unify them. I´m using wordpress in both but the permalinks are different... Any tips 4 me folks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Why do some domains out rank stronger authority domains
Hi, If we take the Moz stats into account here, how comes sometimes weak Moz stat domains out ranking strong Moz stat domains? For example: A inner page with DA56 / PA40 is outranking a Wikipedia inner page with DA100 / PA82. That's a massive difference basically twice as strong on the Wikipedia page but being out ranking. In this case I assume the onpage SEO is playing a big part, but can onpage optimisation be that powerful? And I see this all the time, what SEO factors cause this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0 -
301 from penalized domain to new domain
I have a client whose site isn't necessarily penalized since they still show for many terms in the SERPS, however at one point they did an xrummer blast of 13,000 links for two anchor texts they were trying to rank for. They have purchased a new domain and have gone white hat and want to 301 some of the old site to the new purely for the users sake so past visitors still find them at t the new location. Will creating 301 redirects pass on to the new domain any bad Karma from the old one in Google's eyes? Thanks for the help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoshGill270 -
Sub-domains and different languages
Hi there! All our content is in two languages: English and Spanish, but they're basically the same (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter). We have the English content under a subdomain (en.mydomain.com) and the Spanish one under another subdomain (es.mydomain.com). First of all: is that correct? Is it better to have it under folders or under subdomains? But the most important question. When a user enters to mydomain.com is redirected through a 302 to the Spanish subdomain or to the English subdomain, depending on the language of his browser (microsoft.com works this way). We have now a lot of links pointing to mydomain.com but... where is all this link flow going?? Are we losing it? Should we have a landing page under mydomain.com pointing to both subdomains? or maybe redirect it through a 301 to just one of the subdomains, then redirect the user to his language if necessary? Thank you very much!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick0