On a day to day basis real estate professionals are buying multiple secondary domain names for their real estate websites. However, once purchased, most domain owners do not take full advantage of what these domains can provide. This article is intended to show the best practices for taking full advantage of your secondary domain names.
Can’t I just forward all of my domains to my homepage?
Not too long ago website owners and even search marketing professionals were buying a ton of domain names and simply pointing them back to one destination. They would then submit these domain names to the search engines in hopes of having all of their domain names indexed and ranked, in the hopes of creating a mass populated search results page of their domain names. Over time the search engines picked up on this, and realized that some people may not have the most relevant content; rather they just have a ton of domain names pointing back to the same content. Search engines fixed this by not allowing those multiple domain names to be seen at any significant position, and in some cases not allowing for the primary domain name to be as successful as it possibly could be within the results.
What should I do with all of these domain names I own?
The most ideal scenario for using multiple domain names is to have a website on each one of the domains that you own. Each website should be at least 2-3 pages and, like any other site you want to get ranked, they each should have a lot of really resourceful, unique content. By creating this portfolio of specific websites targeting certain aspects of your business or areas that you farm, your websites and their domains will receive much more value and recognition from the search engines than forwarding all of your domains to one site ever could.
What if I don’t have the time, money or technical knowledge to create more websites?
Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to create a website for every domain name that they own. So, one useful technique is to take your great real estate domain names and direct them to specific internal pages of content that are relevant to that actual domain name.
Example:
Primary Domain: RealEstate.com
Secondary Domains: Homes.com, Condos.com, Realtor.com
The ideal setup for this website is to have your primary domain, in this case RealEstate.com, be your homepage, consisting of relevant content regarding Real Estate and what the rest of the site will hold. From here you want to point your Homes.com secondary domain to an internal page of RealEstate.com that focuses specifically on Homes in Real Estate. The same works for Condos.com and Realtor.com, they should be pointed to individual pages within RealEstate.com that focus specifically on Condos and Realtors.
You want to make sure that you are permanently 301 re-directing Homes.com and all other secondary domain names to their unique page on RealEstate.com.
Although a website with a clean structure and well defined hierarchy is recommended, using this domain forwarding strategy for your site with your multiple domains can be beneficial for your visitors and your marketing campaigns.
You can now also use these individual domain names within specific marketing campaigns. If you have a new condo for sale you can include your Condo related domain name in your marketing efforts. This will allow people that receive your information to be directed to exactly what they are looking for rather than a location that might not be very unique or specific to their request.
Remember that you always want to maintain a clear, consistent brand for your business. If doing any of the above goes against that or dilutes your brand in any way than we do not recommend doing it. The recommendations above or for those who happened to have picked up some great domain names and need to do something useful with them now to maximize their potential.
If you have a massive list of domain names and are still not quite sure which might be beneficial for your real estate marketing, then please feel free to email us and we will help you take advantage of what you have. You can also refer to our previous post on Great Real Estate Domains to get a better idea of what constitutes a good domain name.
