There’s a lot of real estate agents that, as part of their real estate marketing strategy, own and hold a lot of domains; but in a lot of cases, they aren’t really sure what they should do with them or why they really bought them in the first place.
While domains are fairly inexpensive to buy and hold anyways, if you have a ton of them, it could start to get expensive over time; plus, if you’re not using them correctly or buying them for the right reasons, it’s a waste of your marketing dollars.
Outside of your primary domain, there are really only 2 reasons to purchase additional domains:
- You’re using them as part of your marketing strategy.
- You don’t want anyone else to own them or use them.
★ Domains that you hold and redirect are a lot different than your primary domain that your website actually lives on. If you want to do a deeper dive into choosing a primary domain for your real estate business, have a look at this post right here.
1. Buying Domains as Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Depending on which domains you own, it might make sense to redirect them to strategic landing pages on your primary website for tracking reasons.
For example, if you owned www.homevalue.com, then that would make a great domain to be forwarded to a home evaluation page on your website and to then use it on any print marketing for 2 reasons:
- It’s an easily marketable domain.
- You’d be able to see referral traffic from that domain to your website landing page and better understand how many people you successfully reached as part of your marketing campaign.
If a domain is highly marketable and fits with your real estate marketing strategy, it probably makes sense to buy it, even if you don’t know what to do with it right now, and it’s just to hold onto it until you’re able to use it as part of your marketing efforts.
2. Buying Domains as Part of Blocking Others From Buying Them
Depending on your marketing strategy, it might make sense to buy and hold domains purely so other people cant buy and own them.
For example, if you’re located in Canada, and your primary domain is a .ca domain, you may also want to purchase and redirect the .com version, purely because you don’t want anyone else to own it and be able to do whatever they want with it.
If you think that you come across a domain for sale that you know you’ll never put a website on, but you simply don’t want anyone else to own it because it may compete with you, then it makes sense to buy it and hold onto it.
★ Want to learn more about your competition as a real estate agent? Have a look at these posts:
- Understanding Your Competition as a Real Estate Agent
- How To Monitor Your Competition’s Digital Strategy, To Improve Your Own
- How to Effectively Monitor Your Brand’s Online Presence
Redirected Domains and Your SEO Strategy
A lot of agents buy, hold, and redirect domains to to their primary domain because they think it’s good for SEO, but in actuality, that strategy doesn’t do anything all for one simple reason: if there’s nothing on your actual domain, it will never show up in a search result.
For example, if I was a real estate agent in Miami, and my primary domain was my name (like www.johnsmith.com), and I owned and redirected www.miamihomesforsale.com to my primary domain, it will not make my website rank for ‘miami homes for sale’ or any variation of that keyword. At all. Doing this will do absolutely nothing for your ongoing SEO strategy. In the above scenario, since there’s no actual website at miamihomesforsale.com, that domain will never show up in a search result.
★ Want to learn more about SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- How ‘Dwell Time’ and Quality Content Work Together to Improve SEO
Have a Strategy In Place
Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with owning. holding, or redirecting multiple domains provided you know why you’re doing it and getting value out of it.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
