Is it better to have one website and have all of your traffic directed there or to have multiple sites. For example one for end buyers, one for sellers, and one for investors?
Not a bad idea to have one for each. But you don’t have to buy a whole new domain for each, just sub-domain your main website. So for instance if your website is AikenInvestors.com you make a subdomain like AikenInvestors.com/sellers, AikenInvestors.com/buyers
or what ever you want to name you subdomain.
One well built website is far more better than having many websites that is still under construction, and it is much easier to maintain and achieve higher rankings by only focusing on 1 website.
One website with multiple pages will do. As stated, get the sub domains established. They are part of your website, just different pages.
:bobble
I’ve taken both approaches, but I’d prefer having a site just for buying and a separate just for selling, and one that is a company brand. Reason being, is that I have better conversions and more leads. Folks just get confused when you have 101 different things on your site (About Me, Buy a House, Sell a House, Become a Lender, etc. etc.).
Folks come to your site to sell their house (or buy one). A simple, 1 page site that has all the pertinent information and a place where they can enter their information converts better.
By keeping your website(s) simple, and having your contact information easily found, you will notice a difference. Given this, I think of my site(s) as being squeeze pages vs. having a 20-page website that is all over the place.
Not to mention, I’d rather not have my sellers see how much I’m re-selling their house for on the very same site they came to to sell it.
Not a bad idea to have one for each. But you don't have to buy a whole new domain for each, just sub-domain your main website. So for instance if your website is AikenInvestors.com you make a subdomain like AikenInvestors.com/sellers, AikenInvestors.com/buyers
This isn’t a sub-domain. It’s a page within your site, thus it means you’ve got the buying and selling services on the same website. A subdomain would look like:
sellers.aikeninvestors.com
One well built website is far more better than having many websites that is still under construction, and it is much easier to maintain and achieve higher rankings by only focusing on 1 website.
I wouldn’t be advertising a website that’s still under construction. Besides, you can build a 1-page site in 20 minutes. Ranking is another issue, but there’s ways to get it atop the search engines within minutes as well. If you’re just trying to rank one site using SEO, then that could take hours/days/months, depending on competition and your on-page/off-page SEO.
If I’m selling a house online, I hardly ever put it on my own website. I use postlets.com for this.
Not to mention newspapers and bandit signs/directionals So, I’m really only concerned with ranking and getting traffic to my buying site.
Not arguing with anyone. I’m just sharing what’s worked for me (and many others). :beer
I used to have the same confusion but as i have read your posts here I’m kinda enlightened that I don’t have to spend much to have sub-domains.
Well, thanks for the tips and helpful information shared here. I hope to learn some more from here.
You should have several different websites that contain specific themes and messages that are targeted towards the audience or prospects you are trying to reach. For example, in my real estate investing business I utilize 4 different websites that serve 4 different purposes:
-
Website #1 is specifically designed to attract, capture and pre-screen seller leads.
-
Website # 2 is specifically designed to attract, capture and pre-screen retail buyer leads.
-
Website # 3 is specifically designed to attract, capture and pre-screen investor buyers for the wholesaling part of my business.
-
Website # 4 is specifically designed to attract, capture and pre-screen potential private lenders who are interested in earning a return on their money for investing in my real estate business.
The number one reason why you shouldn’t have everything on one website. It’s called confusion! To illustrate my point imagine going to a movie theater and having to watch 4 different movies at the same time on the same screen.
I’d recommend different sites that are each focused on that particular segment. I’ve seen the sites that mix them all together. To me, confusing.
If you’re a retail buyer, you don’t need to be looking at investment properties and solicits for private money lending.
I’d stick with just one site.
It in part depends on whether you have the time to optimize and manage 3 sites versus one.
I agree with most of the posters here. It will probably be much easier, cheaper and more manageable to run with one well managed website. You can focus your SEO on your target search results and then sub out the rest of your website to cater to others who are already visiting your site.
One “brochure website”
At least four “sqeeze pages” to capture leads (retail buyers, wholesale buyers, sellers, & private investors)
All should have separate domains, which run about $9/year each.
Website usability is probably one of the most overlooked aspects of internet marketing. I highly suggest you split it into multiple niche sites. You don’t want your sellers seeing the properties you bought from other sellers for resale at a substantial profit (not that they would know your profit, but still). I suggest separating the buying side from the selling side with two completely different domain names, not subdomains. Domain names are cheap and some web design companies can give you the same layout, but you change the content (helps to keep costs low). You could do something like yournamebuyshomes.com for buying as an example. Sites will need to be setup to funnel the lead in a different way. Just having a single site with a contact us page doesn’t cut it.
I would suggest you buy one domain then add another pages for each, like the other said.
I may be wrong here, but I don’t really believe that “investors” building websites to generate leads is very effective. Mainly because most of the keywords you are targeting are already highly saturated with high quality real estate agent pages. You may be able to get some long-tail keyword traffic to your site, but overall the conversions would be minimal, imo of course.
Most here seem to be selling something in their links on their profiles anyway so they aren’t really tied down to a geographical niche that limits their traffic, so SEO may work for them better in selling these courses.
Like I said, I may be wrong here and have been lurking here for quite a few years, but I don’t see it being very effective for at least 90% of investors.
I myself went with separate domains. But I can see the advantage of having sub-domains as long as the main site is well built and optimized.
All of the techniques discussed in this forum are good like many others are, but the best practices for you depends not on your business, but on your business model. Every business in some way even closely knit companies all selling the same product or service might run a little differently. Important to all techniques is that you choose one that best fits your budget, talk to marketing companies that are first website developers and also understand the network and administration of servers and server services. If for instance you had your own server you can control traffic know where it came from and direct it where you want it to go all on one site without having to spend money on 4 seperate marketing campaigns.
Jared
Senior IT Solutions Provider
I agree with what most people just said in this thread. If you are about to optimize the site, it would be hard optimizing 3 than one
To add here, they have a choice to choose and target those keywords that are not highly saturated. Like this they can work accordingly.