What are your thoughts on creating other websites with a .io or .co at the end of the domain. For example for Carly the domain NanaimoRealEstate.io is available.
What if you had this website and built pages and blogs using chatgpt but all of them had links back to your main site of CarlyCarey.com?
You would get the domain of Nanaimo Real Estate which I feel like google would like. But then your main CarlyCarey site would get a ton of back links.
OR
Is it better just to create more blogs on CarlyCarey.com about Nanaimo real estate, rather than purchasing another domain and building out that site?
Hi Matt,
I’ve also considered this, but it’s too much work to create the SEO content for multiple sites. Essentially diluting my time and content. In addition, I’m not sure 50% of the public understands anything but .com.
I’m sure @Morgan or someone smarter than me could chime in around the importance of SEO in the URL, but .com is the standard. .io, co, .net, .realtor all seem like mistakes from a marketing perspective. I’d rather have Pozek.com than Orlandohomesforsale.io any day
It’s not a hard-rule, but you get some benefits like being more memorable (people often just assume URLs end with .com or other common extensions) and more trustworthy.
I think some candidate cases for getting another top-level domain extension would be:
A) If you’re doing something interesting or creative with extensions like “.homes” or “.land”
B) You’re denying those URLs to competitors or potentially malicious actors
In the latter case you’d be scooping up those domains with no intention of actually implementing anything on them. It’s pretty much universally recommended that you don’t have multiple websites for the same business.
The more important question (than the domain extension) is the process you’re considering.
What you’ve just described is actually a violation of Google’s TOS (creating content for the purpose of artificially inflating backlinks). So what you would find is that all of that effort and expense would be wasted as Google would devalue all of the links.
If it was that easy (just create nonauthority domains and link back to our main sites) there would be so many spammy sites on the web just for this purpose it would dilute user experience.
Your best bet - focus on quality content on one domain and build “true authority” which means “earning” links over time.
Link building is frustrating because there are no short cuts and it requires your content to be extremely unique, high value, interesting etc - I think the best way to stand out (for Realtors) is already unpacked by several of the members on this thread - and that is video. It’s multi-purpose and omni-channel.
A few great videos (especially if you can have one or two go viral) can be a real boost to your backlinks.
But that means creativity is a must. Don’t be boring, be funny, be quirky, be unique or be EXTREMELY high value in terms of content, Interestingly “quality” (in terms of production value) is the least important here. Consumers love content that feels homegrown (not that high quality hurts, it’s just al ot of people stress about quality and it becomes a blocker when really it’s not that big of a deal.
The other thing is the 80-20 rule Spend 80% of your effort getting it out there. That means if you spend 10 hours producing a piece of content, you (or someone who you pay to do the marketing) needs to spend 40 hours getting it out there.
link building sucks (it’s hard)… but the good news is, it’s hard for everyone, so you don’t need 100’s of links, you just need 10 really good ones
