Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To avoid looking spammy it's generally advised to avoid using hyphens in domain names.  Also using hyphens means that a certain percentage of your visitors will type the name in incorrectly and end up on someone else's site (i.e. a competitor).

If possible go for a brandable name.

If your site deals predominantly with one particular country then go for the local ccTLD domain.

Otherwise, try other creative combinations of words.

Of course you could always try to purchase a keyword rich domain off someone else.

For this strategy to work effectively you need to use distinct domain names.

Keyword domains tend to rank well for those keywords, but it will take time to have a measurable effect.  The domains (minisites) will still need incoming links to do well - at minimum submit them to a couple of relevant directories, but the more time you can put into promoting them, the better.

You should probably have localized landing pages on your main domain too, but make sure the content isn't the same as that on the keyword domains.

Yes, that's a worthwhile strategy.  But don't just duplicate the content on each domain name - make sure there is unique and substantial content on each domain (don't just change the city name and keep the rest of the text the same).  Also, to get the benefits of doing this, don't duplicate content across the minisites and your main site.

Some things to check:

If your search results are being indexed is there only one URL per keyword combination?
Avoid showing the same content on multiple URLs - or restrict the SE bots to just one of them per keyword.

e.g. check you don't have a structure like this:

domain.name/search/location=xyz
domain.name/search/location=xyz&keyword=abc
domain.name/location/keyword

The same applies to the detail pages of your real estate listings.  I.e. don't let the SEs see content on all of these URLs:

domain.name/location/listing_id
domain.name/keyword/listing_id
domain.name/listing_id
domain.name/listing_slug

Rather than making duplicate content noindex I would prefer to redirect it to a common URL if possible.

To reduce duplicate content issues with client material, add extra info to the pages.  E.g. some things to try are:

• adding region/suburb info to search results pages
• pre-parse listings and extract key info on features/facilities/etc., then display that key info in a features box or something so that both the HTML and content differs a lot from client sites.

Some things to check:

If your search results are being indexed is there only one URL per keyword combination?
Avoid showing the same content on multiple URLs - or restrict the SE bots to just one of them per keyword.

e.g. check you don't have a structure like this:

domain.name/search/location=xyz
domain.name/search/location=xyz&keyword=abc
domain.name/location/keyword

The same applies to the detail pages of your real estate listings.  I.e. don't let the SEs see content on all of these URLs:

domain.name/location/listing_id
domain.name/keyword/listing_id
domain.name/listing_id
domain.name/listing_slug

Rather than making duplicate content noindex I would prefer to redirect it to a common URL if possible.

To reduce duplicate content issues with client material, add extra info to the pages.  E.g. some things to try are:

• adding region/suburb info to search results pages
• pre-parse listings and extract key info on features/facilities/etc., then display that key info in a features box or something so that both the HTML and content differs a lot from client sites.