January 6, 2022AGENT BASICS

14 Expert Tips to Choose a Great Real Estate Domain Name (+ Name Generator)

hen it comes to choosing great real estate domain names, our friend Bruce Ailion is hard to beat. He was lucky enough to snag locationlocationlocation.com. But that was years ago and all the good domain names are taken now, right?

Not so fast. If you’re struggling to come up with a domain name, you can use the expert tips and free real estate domain name generator in this article to find one that will help you dominate your market for years to come. Here’s our best advice for a killer domain name.

1. Make Sure Your Real Estate Domain Name Is Memorable

Let’s face it—at some point in your career, people are going to ask you what your website is. If you want people to actually visit your site, you need to make sure the name is memorable.

A good rule of thumb here is to tell a friend or colleague what your domain name is and see what their reaction is. If their first response is something like, “What?!” then that’s a pretty good sign that you need to go back to the drawing board. If they can remember your domain name two weeks later, on the other hand, chances are you’ve got a winner on your hands.

2. Use Our Free Domain Name Generator

While there are a lot of sites out there that let you pick a domain name, very few of them offer good suggestions for other ideas when the name you want is taken. That’s why we built this free real estate domain name generator. Just plug in your name, your farm area, or both, and click generate.

You can keep Bluehost open in another tab and then copy/paste the names you like from the generator to see if they’re available. Bluehost is a great option to register a name and get $2.99 per month web hosting.

Open Bluehost

3. Add Action Words to Your Brand Name

Have a super-common name or brand name and need a .com? Don’t sweat it, get creative. That’s what Clever Real Estate founder Benjamin Mizes did. Since clever.anything was snapped up back in the AOL days, he decided to boil down his core goals and incorporate that into his domain name.

The result was listwithclever.com, a website with a domain that was easy to remember, catchy, used his brand name, and even better, managed to convey what he wants his visitors to do. List their properties with his company.

Pretty clever, right? If you want to do something similar, make a list of action words and short phrases that might work with your name or brand. List with, sell with, buy with, work with—use your imagination and you might snag yourself a real estate domain name that ticks all the boxes in this article.

4. Don’t Worry About Using Keywords in Your Domain Name

The cold harsh truth about the almost religious promises that some marketers make about search engine optimization (SEO) is that they’re just wrong. Like, really wrong.

Ranking anywhere on Google can take years. Ranking on the front page for uber-competitive keywords that billion-dollar companies like Zillow are fighting for might never happen. That’s because Google doesn’t just look at keywords when ranking pages for a particular keyword. If they did, then the first result for every search would be “what you searched”.com. Instead, they use a complex algorithm that weights your website’s value based on how old it is, how much spam is on it, keywords, and how many other sites link to it.

So don’t stuff keywords into your domain name unless they sound good and make sense for your brand. Ranchhousesforsaleindallas.com doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? It also doesn’t provide Google users looking for ranch houses in Dallas the best answer either.

Don’t Give Up on SEO Entirely, Though

Don’t get me wrong—just because I’m saying (from experience) that ranking on Google for good keywords is difficult and will take work doesn’t mean you should just give up on SEO entirely. You should always follow SEO best practices on your blog and engage in PR to get backlinks. Just know that you have to be in it for the long haul for any SEO you do to pay off.

[Related article: Real Estate SEO: 11 Tips to Dominate Local Search & Get Free Leads in 2022]

5. Make Sure Your Domain Sounds Like a Professional Brand

One of the main goals of real estate marketing is to get your leads into an environment you can control. That’s why closings generally happen in a conference room rather than, say, someone’s living room. It’s also why getting people on the phone is way better than chatting on Facebook.

After all, if you can control the environment, you can subtly edge people into making a choice that leads to a desired outcome. Ideally, this is what your website is for. It’s an environment you can control and hopefully convince people to enter their contact info, or better yet, pick up the phone.

Of course, no one is going to trust an environment that doesn’t sound professional. You could have the best-designed landing pages in the universe, but if they’re on “johhny2222realtorzz.org,” then your leads might be (justifiably) leery about giving you their personal information.

With so many good real estate domain names already taken, it can be tempting to add a funky spelling, or God forbid, a hyphen to your name. Unless someone literally has a gun to your head, you should resist this temptation at all costs.

You only need to think for a minute or so in order to understand why. It makes your name harder to remember, it doesn’t look professional, and it can lead to people confusing your site for another real estate site with a simpler name.

So if you come up with a clever domain name like reeeelestate.com, chances are people are going to miss an E and Google will suggest the obvious “realestate.com” instead. As a general rule of thumb, if someone needs you to clarify how to spell your domain more than once, it’s not a good name.

7. Think Twice Before Using Your Personal Branding as Your Real Estate Domain Name

While using your personal branding as your domain can work great, you might want to think twice before clicking on that “buy” button on Bluehost or GoDaddy.

After all, are you sure that the brand you came up with two months ago is going to work for you and your business six months from now? What about six years from now?

What happens if you expand your farm area? What happens if you end up moving? What happens if you start a team?

You can avoid the branded domain expiration date problem by choosing a brand that focuses on your name, general real estate terms, or better yet, a combination of the two.

“Joesmithsellsrealestate.com” will work anywhere you move, and for your entire career. “Joesmithsellsmiami.com” isn’t very practical if you end up moving to Colorado.

8. Choose a .Com Name, But Remember to Buy Out Other TLDs

Sadly, even though lots of well-intentioned people worked very hard to come up with new top-level domains (TLDs), pretty much everyone is still conditioned to see anything besides .com as inferior and maybe even untrustworthy.

That means you’re going to have to get creative if you want a .com domain name. For most people, the most creative combination of words they have is their names—unless you happen to be named something very common like John Smith. Then you’re going to have to get creative. Sorry! Hey, look, “johnsmithsellshouses.com” is available.

Once you buy your .com domain, always try to buy out the other TLDs of the same domain. This way, if someone types in the wrong TLD or you become so successful that rival agents buy up variations of your domain and hold them for ransom, you’re covered.

9. Make Sure You Can Get Twitter, Facebook & Instagram Accounts Under the Same Name

Even if you have a great domain name, asking your sphere to remember obscure social media account names with dashes and numbers is a little rude. Well, maybe not rude, but at the very least you will guarantee they don’t memorize your social media accounts.

Instead, try to come up with a domain that you can get social media accounts for. While it becomes increasingly difficult by the day, just keep it as a goal in the back of your head when coming up with domain names.

10. Can’t Find a Catchy Real Estate Domain Name? Buy One.

OK, I know we said you can get a free domain name like five paragraphs up, but at the end of the day, you gotta do you. That means that if you’ve worked long and hard at creating the perfect brand you KNOW will kick butt online, then buying a real estate domain instead of getting one for free might make sense.

As an added bonus, you might be able to buy an old domain name that already has a link profile indexed by Google, which means you might start out WAY ahead of your competition for the front page! Doubtful, but possible.

Just make sure to kick the tires on any domain that you buy. Use a tool like Moz to make sure it does not have a high spam score on Google, has a decent domain authority, and isn’t loaded up with Russian bot spam.

11. Make Sure Your Domain Name Isn’t Taken on Google My Business

Since you need to be THE local expert, one of the first things you should do before clicking yes on that new domain name is see if anyone else is using it locally.

While trademark law can be tricky, having someone else using your name in your farm area is a non-starter, no matter what the law says. Just think, people searching for your business will find theirs first, and unless you have some serious money to spend on SEO, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

12. Don’t Expect Your Website to Rank on Google Just Because You Include Your Farm Area

Want to know a secret most SEO companies will never tell you? A huge percentage of the work they do is based on nothing but guesswork. Even worse, a guess that might be right on Monday might not be right on Wednesday, and might even switch BACK again on Saturday!

So that means pretty much all of the “rules” that SEO experts swear by are the online equivalent of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Some guess better than others, but at the end of the day, they’re still guessing.

The biggest myth by far is that adding your local town name will help you rank on Google local searches. Again, there is no hard evidence to back this up. It might work, it might not.

So … should you or shouldn’t you? Well, if you can squeeze your town name in and it sounds professional and the result is easy to remember, then go for it. Of course, if the only way you can include it leaves you with a 60-character domain name with hyphens … yeah, not going to work.

13. Using the .Realtor TLD Will Not Help You Rank on Google Either

Ever since it was introduced, the TLD (top-level domain name like .com, .net .org) .realtor has been hyped well beyond its sell-by date. Again, like with SEO, the idea that a .realtor domain name will help you rank on Google is about as true as claiming the earth is flat.

In fact, most experts agree that Google only really treats local country domains, like .uk and nonprofit domains like .org, differently than all the others. That said, others say that Google doesn’t treat ANY TLDs differently and only ranks sites by metadata or other information.

So use the .Realtor TLD for your domain name if (and only if) you like the way it sounds. You will probably not rank any better because you use it.

14. Make Sure There Are No Hidden Meanings in Your Domain Name

Unless your goal as a real estate agent is to make junior high school boys giggle, then you’re going to want to make extra sure there are no hidden meanings in your domain name.

While you may not be trying to make your clients blush with your domain name, sometimes when you take two perfectly innocent words and put them together … well, you end up with something not so innocent.

Here are a few notorious examples. Can you spot why they would make a roomful of teenagers burst into laughter?

Oh, and please don’t look up these websites. 🙉🙈🙊 They are here for instructive purposes only!

OddsExtractor.com
PenIsland.com
ExpertsExchange.com
WebOne.com
OldMansHaven.com
ThePenIsMightier.com
SpeedofArt.com
WausauFestivalofArts.org

Emile L'Eplattenier

LICENSED AGENT

A nationally recognized founder, branding expert, and industry thought leader, Emile cut his teeth in real estate in 2007 crafting marketing strategies for the Chrysler and MetLife Buildings. see full bio