Choosing a domain name for your real estate website can be difficult - you want something snappy and memorable, but you also need to take things like search engine rankings and availability into account. If you’re thinking of setting up a new website for 2011, here are our tips for choosing that all-important name:
Think location. Some real estate agents - such as our previous website spotlights christophechoo.com and gellens.com - choose to use their own name as their website’s address. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, it does mean that you’ll need to put extra work into optimising the content of your website to appear in location-focused search results.
A safer bet for agents who want their website to show up when people search for real estate in their local community is to incorporate that location into the domain name itself, as westernmahomes.net and clarkcountyrealestateguide.com have done. This way you’re already a few steps ahead when it comes to SEO, and potential clients know exactly what you cover as soon as they see your web address.
Research and go niche. As you can see in the previous two examples, the key to a good location-based domain name is being as specific as possible. The last thing you want is to end up paying for a domain that’s competing against a big national player, so spend some time researching which websites appear in search results for the keywords you want to target.
Once you have a clear idea of which websites you’ll be going up against, think about whether you can focus in on a specific corner of your market and come up with a few corresponding domain name options. Now comes the fun (or frustrating) part - checking to see which of these is already registered.
If it’s not available, modify. Even if you find that all the domain names you thought of are already registered by someone else, don’t give up. There are words you can add that will ensure you have an original name.
clarkcountyrealestateguide.com is a great example - it has managed to differentiate itself from clarkcountyrealestate.com just by adding a single word. Other options include adding “live in” before the location in your domain name, or using something like “own[location]realestate.com”.
Of course, there are plenty of other words and phrases you could use to help your website stand out, so if you’ve got a domain name you’re particularly proud of, let us know what it is in our comments.
[Image: bump]
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