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
-
Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain
I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp0 -
Merging domains into sudomains
I know that questions about this topic have been asked before, but I didn't really find an answer that I could apply to our situation. We have several websites that now exist on separate domains, even though their topics are closely related. We are moving each of these sites into a new CMS and are considering collapsing all of the domains into a sub-domain structure around the strongest domain. Important to note: All of the current domains have existed for many years and have strong site authority, and regardless of the domain decision, in this restructuring we will be bringing them all under a global header. I know that there are SEO risks to moving a site from an established domain to a new one, even with 301 redirects in place, but the team in charge of this move wants to know how much of a hit we would take and how quickly natural search traffic might recover. Maybe and mights aren't really satisfying their questions... Does anyone have experience with collapsing domains into a sub-domain structure and feel like sharing your results? Most importantly, was it worth it???? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuliaG0 -
I have 2 Questions
what if we do the interlinking on the exact keywords? Is this comes under spam technique? For example - http://blog.payscout.com/automotive-merchant-services/ I interlink the exact keyword in the above URL. Can we use same image 2-3 times on the same website with different anchor tags? For example - http://packforcity.com/what-to-wear-in-new-orleans-in-january/ http://packforcity.com/what-to-wear-in-san-francisco-in-october/ Same image used on the website with different alt tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
PageRank vs. Domain Authority
A web-site has PR5 but in OSE I see that Domain Authority is only 26. I've also checked and the domain was registered in 2009. Is this normal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ditoroin0 -
Construction website
Hi, I have a construction website that is aimed at tradesmen. There are 2 goals of the site: 1. To allow potential customers to sign up for a trade account. 2. To allow existing customers to access to products and login to their account to make an order. The site is full of categories and products which should be indexed so we rank for these trade products. The homepage redesign is where i am having an issue: Currently the site is set up like a standard retail site but without prices, which are viewable only when logged in. The homepage is designed such that there is several call to actions about promotions, services and to apply for a trade account, that apply to both existing and potential customers. At the moment there is a poor conversion to get potential customers to apply for a trade account. This is because there is too much distraction away from this goal and they are allowed to engage other areas of the site freely. The main purpose of the homepage should be to encourage potential customers to sign up. The secondary purpose to for existing customers to access the accounts and products. I believe potential customers should not be exposed to the categories and products as it is a distraction from the primary goal. Potential customers, i.e. Tradesmen, would already have a certain understanding of the types of products we provide, so I don't feel it is necessary to allow them to crawl the rest of the site unless they have an account. What are your thoughts on that? Here is my lack of understanding: On the homepage, if I restrict access to categories and products to existing account holders only, where a login is required to proceed, would that mean Google cannot access these pages to index them? Or is this only controlled by NoFollows & Robots.txt? Obviously not indexing is undesirable. I do understand potential customers will need some information about our range of products but the idea is to coerce them to sign up for an account so they can see this information. The more information that is provided to a potential customer, the higher the probability a person can make a decision against applying for an account. Restricting access creates a motivator to reveal information and we capture their data to converse with them personally. This increases the probability of us being able to retain their interest by providing a customised service based on their needs. All of this I feel makes perfect sense to me, the only query/obstacle I have is the indexing of the site. If Google cannot index pages that are restricted by account access, then I would like suggestions to solve/compromise/optimise the above. Just to address the desired behaviour of index pages. If in search a our product page appears, the person clicking the link would either be redirected or exposed to a login or sign up screen to view. Thank you so much for your help. Antonio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AVSFencingSupplies0 -
Websites with same content
Hi, Both my .co.uk and .ie websites have the exact same content which consists of hundreds of pages, is this going to cause an issue? I have a hreflang on both websites plus google webmaster tools is picking up that both websites are targeting different counties. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
If we add noindex to a subdomain, will the traffic to that subdomain still generate domain authority for the primary domain?
We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon0 -
Article + 2 links to the same root domain
I am writing an article that has 2 links: The fist one is to : http://xxx.net/the-be... The second one is to : http://xxx.net/ The links are with different ancor texts and I am wondering about the link power they will bring to my website. Will both links count? Will the first one send significantly more PR than the second one ? I am asking this because my MAIN objective is the second link. Much Thanks Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IamSharp0
