How To Use Domain Names To Improve Your Google Rankings

As you know, I recently started a new passive income business that went from conception to launch in just one month.

In my last article I briefly mentioned how I was able to start getting some great organic search results (that means free traffic from search engines that I don’t have to pay for!). I’d like to share with you today how I did that.

The Power Of Having Keywords In Your Domain Name

From prior experience I knew the power of having keywords in your domain name. For example this site ranked #1 in Google for my primary keyword “houston finance tutor” and “finance tutor houston” in just 20 days with ZERO other marketing. The only reason it ranked there was because my keywords were in the domain name: houstonfinancetutor.com.

Following this same logic, I launched the new tutoring site with a separate domain for each region. Here are some of the ones I chose:

  • www.austin-tutor.com
  • www.new-york-tutor.com
  • www.tutors-boston.com
  • www.philadelphia-tutor.com

It’s worth noting here that each site had separate content and separate tutors on it. If you are thinking of duplicating your site across multiple domains to rank in search engines, don’t do it. It won’t work because search engines are pretty good at detecting duplicate content. They will just pick one copy and discard the rest. But that wasn’t the case here….I had separate tutors on each site generating separate content.

I chose these domains after using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to see what people were searching for. As expected, many people living in a particular city were doing “regional” searches for a tutor. In other words, they were including their city name in the search as opposed to entering a generic term like “algebra tutor”.

The “regional” searches were much less competitive terms to rank for on Google, so I figured I had a good shot of getting on the first page of Google for some of those terms.

How did it work? Pretty well.

Within a week or two I was getting first page Google listings for some of the less competitive keywords like “biology tutor austin” or “latin tutor austin”. If you know anything about search engine optimization, then you know for a brand new site to get first page listings in Google in a few weeks is pretty outstanding.

However, I was NOT yet getting on the first page for more competitive terms like “algebra tutor austin” (a more popular subject) or “austin tutor”.

There were also several other problems, most notably that I had to manage and market many separate sites now. I had to try and get incoming links to each one, register each one, set up my software to work with each one, etc. Plus they weren’t the most prestigious looking domains, given that they had hyphens in them.

Keywords In A Subdomain

For the reasons mentioned above I decided to combine all my sites into one domain: www.UniversityTutor.com

This would make it easier to manage, but then I would lose the benefit of having my keyword (city name) in the domain, right?

To fix that I decided to use regional subdomains just like houston.craigslist.com or houston.citysearch.com.

Now my domains would look like this:

  • austin.universitytutor.com
  • newyork.universitytutor.com
  • boston.universitytutor.com
  • philadelphia.universitytutor.com

Having a subdomain with your keyword in it doesn’t give you quite as big of a boost in search results as having a domain with your keyword, but it is still much better than not having it at all.

Plus I figured the other benefits of the new setup made up for anything that was lost: I would now have a professional looking domain without any hyphens, the domain had been around a long time and wasn’t “brand new” in Google’s eyes, and now all my marketing (and incoming links) could be directed to one site instead of being divided up.

Managing the Transition

I certainly didn’t want to lose all the rankings I’d already obtained with the old sites, so I had to manage the transition closely. A special thanks goes out to my friend Josh at Spot On SEO who shared some of his wisdom. He was great, so give him a call if you need any help with search engines.

It turns out you can use something called a “301 redirect” to tell Google (and other search engines) when you are moving to a new domain. It took some technical mumbo-jumbo, but I eventually got them set up correctly.

So how well did it work? Well I tracked the results, and here are my search engine rankings comparing the old sites (with separate domains) to the new site (using subdomains) after about two weeks. The dashes represent not ranking anywhere in the top 500.

By the way, the tool I used to track these is called Rank Checker. It’s a free Firefox plugin and I highly recommend it.

Keyword Old Site’s Ranking   New Site’s Ranking
algebra tutor austin 28 19
austin tutor 86 45
austin tutoring 133 36
austin tutoring service - 12
biology tutor austin 1 3
calculus tutor austin 16 5
english tutor austin 22 6
find a tutor in austin 2 9
math tutor austin 50 32
science tutor austin 1 7
tutors in austin 54 33
algebra tutor new york - 106
new york tutor - 96
new york tutoring - 78
new york tutoring service - 72
biology tutor new york 32 53
calculus tutor new york - 61
english tutor new york - 156
find a tutor in new york 7 43
math tutor new york - -
science tutor new york - 89
tutors in new york - -
algebra tutor philadelphia 18 9
philadelphia tutor 36 56
philadelphia tutoring 114 64
philadelphia tutoring service - -
biology tutor philadelphia 8 3
calculus tutor philadelphia 15 5
english tutor philadelphia 32 20
find a tutor in philadelphia 1 15
math tutor philadelphia 48 12
science tutor philadelphia 19 8
tutors in philadelphia 112 65
algebra tutor boston 25 6
boston tutor 84 8
boston tutoring 134 34
boston tutoring service 141 -
biology tutor boston 1 10
calculus tutor boston 4 8
english tutor boston 48 16
find a tutor in boston - 6
math tutor boston 61 13
science tutor boston 7 4
tutors in boston 79 34

Overall the trend was very positive and it was a great improvement in keyword rankings! I imagine many of the ones that did not improve will get picked up in the next week or two as Google catches the last of them.

Some Final Tweaks

Now that I was using subdomains, it meant I could expand to new cities much faster. I didn’t need to hunt for an available domain name for each one!

I now had an incredible opportunity. I had about 40 “subjects” in my database that someone might need a tutor in (everything from Chinese to organic chemistry). I then added about 1,000 cities into the database (along with about 2,000 universities that I could get tutors from). I actually entered these by hand, and yes it was a really boring experience. But hey, if you want to get ahead in life sometimes you have to make sacrifices!

I now had the potential to create a huge number of targeted pages.

Remember that my keywords generally followed the format of “[SUBJECT] tutor [CITY]” like “algebra tutor austin”. Well with 40 subjects and 1,000 cities, I could now create 40 x 1,000 = 40,000 potential keywords to rank for.

The beauty of the site is that THESE PAGES ARE CREATED AUTOMATICALLY when a new tutor signs up in a given city and chooses a subject.

  • The title tag of the page is automatically generated to say “algebra tutor austin”
  • An H1 tag, bold tag, etc is automatically generated to say “algebra tutor austin” somewhere on the page
  • In addition, the URL comes out to be http://austin.universitytutor.com/algebra which contains all the keywords! “algebra”, “tutor”, and “austin”.

These are just a few of the things that search engines look at. If you want to see a more complete list of all the factors search engines look at to “rank” a page, check out this link.

Hopefully these factors will all come together to get some great search engine rankings across a very wide spectrum of pages as more tutors sign up. Currently there are 1,759 pages on the site and Google is still catching up, having only indexed 273 of them so far.

I’ve seen search engine traffic start to go up already, but I hope to be bringing in thousands of visitors per day (free!) from organic search results in the near future.

Conclusions

This may be a bit out there for some people, but hopefully it at least gives you an idea of what is possible, especially if you have a regional business. (Feel free to ask questions below, I’m sure I skipped some important details).

If you’re just getting started with a new site, I think the biggest thing you can take away is this: if you choose a domain (or subdomain) with your primary keyword in it, it can really help you rank for that term in search engines.

Finally I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been buying my book and sending in your kind words. I’m absolutely thrilled that you are finding it useful!

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Want to get 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth for FREE? Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth are yours for free when you subscribe to get updates from StartBreakingFree.com!

20 Comments so far »

  1. Creer un site said,

    Wrote on October 1, 2008 @ 10:08 am

    hi,

    Like always with SEO, things and their opposite are right :D

    I think your outstanding results with subdomain won’t be so good if your domain was not 5 years old.

    but that deserves a try for every website, it’s always possible to go back with the pages ;-)

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 2nd, 2008 12:53 am:

    Nice job catching that! You’re right that the new domain was older which gave it a big benefit.

    [Reply]

  2. uday said,

    Wrote on October 1, 2008 @ 4:02 pm

    Another good one. Informative post Brian.

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 2nd, 2008 12:53 am:

    Glad you got something out of it :)

    [Reply]

  3. Chris Guthrie said,

    Wrote on October 1, 2008 @ 4:27 pm

    I have several long domain names targeting long tail keywords like you’ve done; however, I do not use hyphens in my domains.

    Any reason why you chose to use hyphens in the domains?

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 2nd, 2008 12:56 am:

    Hi Chris, those were the only ones that were available. Especially since I was getting so many of them I couldn’t afford to go for really good (expensive) ones, and hyphenated ones seemed to be available in most cities. Some people think they look tacky but if you are just testing out a new site I think they are fine. It’s relatively easy (as I found out) to move it over to good one if the idea takes off. Thanks!
    Brian

    [Reply]

  4. Freddie said,

    Wrote on October 1, 2008 @ 6:37 pm

    B, wow, that is incredible. You are something else. I keep saying it, but that tutor business was genius. It is one of those sites that you think already exist and has been there forever.

    Your site layout builds on this belief because it is so clean and professionally done. Very Web 2.0ish.

    I have a question, where did you get the databasiing format to pull off the site. Is it just a Wordpress Theme or did you have it designed by a professional?

    Cool, if you don’t want to answer that one.

    Keep it up and thanks for the tip. I was wondering about keywords in the subdomain.

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 2nd, 2008 12:59 am:

    Hi Freddie, I don’t mind sharing at all. This one was custom coded actually which I know isn’t quite as easy for some people, but still doable. I’m actually not crazy about the design…i was thinking of have it redesigned on http://www.crowdspring.com/ eventually even though it’s not the highest priority right now since it looks ok. I haven’t tried CrowdSpring yet, but it looks pretty cool. Thanks for the encouragement!
    Brian

    [Reply]

    Freddie reply on October 2nd, 2008 3:30 am:

    B, that’s for sharing. I figured you did something fancy with that one.

    What do you mean you are going to change the layout? I think it is outstanding, but hey, you are the mastermind behind this one.

    Keep it going!

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 2nd, 2008 3:20 pm:

    It’s not bad, I just think it could be better :) Looks a little dated. Plus I basically knocked off the design for this site: http://www.basecamphq.com/ so it’s really not very original. It worked to get something up and running quickly, but long term it would be better to differentiate. Thanks! -B

  5. Freddie said,

    Wrote on October 3, 2008 @ 9:06 am

    I can feel you, B. You are a leader and tend to be on the cutting edge, so why stop with your site design.

    Well, whenever you go for the redesign, please be sure to let us know how you made that decision. I really loved the fact that you included your drawing designs in the original site.

    Keep it going!

    [Reply]

    Mike reply on October 5th, 2008 12:49 am:

    I hope you continue to write more of these kinds of posts. I find some of the most interesting content on your website is how you are putting together your websites.
    I’m assuming you are using Rails on your website? I have started to learn how to do some web programming with the goal of being able to code my own websites and services. I’m not sure about your other readers but I would be very interested to hear more about the technical aspects of how you create your sites.
    Have you ever considered posting about or making an ebook on how you coded a site like your tutor site?

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 11th, 2008 3:10 pm:

    Hi Mike, yep it’s done in Ruby On Rails. I like the technical stuff too, but I feel like it might not be useful to the majority of readers who aren’t as geeky as we are. I’ve got it on the UserVoice page here and it doesn’t get as many votes:
    http://startbreakingfree.uservoice.com/pages/general?referer_type=top3

    If you have any specific questions though I’d be happy to try and answer them in comments, or feel free to email me. I’m still learning Rails.

    Thanks!
    Brian

    [Reply]

  6. Amit Ganguly said,

    Wrote on October 13, 2008 @ 7:37 pm

    Hi Brian!
    Great post!
    I am new to blogging.I don’t know much about optimizing domains and sub-domains with keywords.But I want to know that if I use generic keywords on my domains based on my blog’s theme,will it affect my ranking in Google?

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 14th, 2008 4:56 pm:

    In general a domain with generic words like http://www.NewYorkBicycleStore.com will outrank a domain with a proprietary brand name like http://www.BrianArmstrongsStore.com. The reason being that people type generic keywords into search engines.

    But if you are a famous brand name like Nike, maybe people will type that into search engines more than shoes. Basically you want to put the words which are searched for most often into your domain name to rank for those terms. Gotta do the keyword research.

    [Reply]

  7. PizzaForADream said,

    Wrote on October 15, 2008 @ 9:20 pm

    Great post! I look forward to following your post and seeing the results!

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 16th, 2008 1:39 am:

    Thanks I will certainly be posting more updates in the future!
    Brian

    [Reply]

  8. Witold Rugowski said,

    Wrote on October 16, 2008 @ 5:59 am

    Hi,
    I have just found this site, through Your comment on my site:) and already added feed to RSS reader. Good work :)

    OK - regarding how fast Google ‘catches up’ with new links - I hope You have created sitemap.xml for this site? From my observations Google without sitemap can have even not 50% of pages after two years (I’m talking about sites ranked in places 500k-900k in Alexa). After adding sitemap in two weeks Google catches up to 90% (about 500 URLs).

    With other site, new domain, 1500 URL after 3 months without sitemap - 200 indexed URLs. After two weeks with sitemap ~400 indexed URLs.

    And for Rails sites creating dynamic sitemap is very simple ;)

    [Reply]

    Brian Armstrong reply on October 18th, 2008 12:45 am:

    Hi Witold, thanks for stopping by and good to meet other rails developers! I definitely spent the time to get a good sitemap together and Google is making it’s way through it now, which I’m following in the Google Webmaster tools. So you are definitely right.

    One thing I was just working on yesterday was a “geo sitemap” which you may know about too. Basically you can give Goolge a geo targeted sitemap so your results come up in Google Maps, etc. Pretty neat stuff, check out this example:
    http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.universitytutor.com%2Fgeodata.kml&ie=UTF8&z=2

    And welcome to the site!
    Brian

    [Reply]

  9. Home Business Answered » How To Make Sure Your Customers Are Getting Your Emails! said,

    Wrote on December 20, 2008 @ 2:18 am

    [...] How To Use Domain Names To Improve Your Google Rankings [...]

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