How To Use Domain Names To Improve Your Google Rankings

In: Marketing By: Brian Armstrong

1 Oct 2008

This entry is part 8 of 18 in the series UniversityTutor.com

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

This post is part of a series on: UniversityTutor.com

31 Responses

Creer un site

October 1st, 2008 at 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 ;-)

Brian Armstrong

October 2nd, 2008 at 12:53 am

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

uday

October 1st, 2008 at 4:02 pm

Another good one. Informative post Brian.

Brian Armstrong

October 2nd, 2008 at 12:53 am

Glad you got something out of it :)

Chris Guthrie

October 1st, 2008 at 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?

Brian Armstrong

October 2nd, 2008 at 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

Freddie

October 1st, 2008 at 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.

Brian Armstrong

October 2nd, 2008 at 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

Freddie

October 2nd, 2008 at 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!

Brian Armstrong

October 2nd, 2008 at 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

Freddie

October 3rd, 2008 at 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!

Mike

October 5th, 2008 at 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?

Brian Armstrong

October 11th, 2008 at 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

Amit Ganguly

October 13th, 2008 at 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?

Brian Armstrong

October 14th, 2008 at 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.

PizzaForADream

October 15th, 2008 at 9:20 pm

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

Brian Armstrong

October 16th, 2008 at 1:39 am

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

Witold Rugowski

October 16th, 2008 at 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 ;)

Brian Armstrong

October 18th, 2008 at 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

B Smith @ Wealth and Wisdom

June 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm

Brian-Can you clarify the 301 redirect? Would having several keyword rich domains point to one domain have a benefit or is it just to keep your historic indexing valid? It doesn’t make sense to have three separate sites for one product. Keeping the content fresh and unique would be a nightmare!

Brian Armstrong

June 5th, 2009 at 12:46 am

Agreed. There is no benefit to having keyword rich sites 301 redirected to your real domain.

301’s are a way to tell Google “the new site is over here” so Google will eventually discount all the referring sites as being old and no longer needed.

It’s only useful to transfer one site to a new one without losing the reputation/position of the old one. Hope it helps!
Brian

B Smith @ Wealth and Wisdom

June 5th, 2009 at 1:06 am

Brian-Thanks. That’s what I thought but I wanted to confirm. It’s getting harder to get SEO link love with all the nofollow tags…

Rick

October 14th, 2009 at 6:03 pm

Brian, I’m a little unclear how the auto-generation of the targeted pages works. Would you mind clarifying? You said that you added 1000 city names in your database and 40 subject areas, but is it correct that actual live webpages are not created until a tutor actually comes in and creates a profile in any given city? What happens if: Lets say you have Los Angeles in your database of 1000 cities, but perhaps you do not have Arcadia (a suburb of Los Angeles) set up. How will this work with the page generation? Will the new tutor just be placed in the Los Angeles page or will a new page specifically for Arcadia be created? If the tutor will be placed in Los Angeles, what is your criteria for making the placement (for example, how does the program know to place the tutor in Los Angeles as opposed to Irvine)? If the tutor is placed on the Los Angeles page (as opposed to a new Arcadia page), is there a way to solve this problem for the purpose of search engine results (for example, if I am looking for a math tutor in Arcadia it will never come up on google if the profile is part of the Los Angeles page)? Is the database entry a necessary step, or could pages be automatically be generated when a tutor signs up for ANY city or town? If database entry is a necessary step could you outsource this work for a significantly larger number of towns/cities? If a page was set up for each town, I imagine you could still set up the site so that any tutor within a 25 mile radius shows up even if they are from a different town. This way you capture the best of both world- more SEO results and relevant search results for users on your site even if a single town may only have a few tutors.

Brian Armstrong

October 15th, 2009 at 7:04 pm

Not sure I entirely understand your question but it geocodes the address they enter, then does a search to find the closest major city. It does this with a plugin for ruby on rails called geokit: http://geokit.rubyforge.org/

So in terms of generating SEO pages, they just get listed on the page for the closest major city. When people use the map search it pulls up tutors within a radius regardless of what city they are in. Hope this helps.

Patrick

December 14th, 2009 at 11:51 pm

Hey there Brian,

First off, I love all of your articles. I have a question though. Why did you use subdomains vs sub directories, or sub folders? From what I understand, google treats sub domains as completely separate websites than the main domain. So why would you want to essentially start over, with a PR of 0, when you can just make it an extension of your main domain, such as http://www.universitytutor.com/austin/algebra.

Brian Armstrong

December 16th, 2009 at 11:46 pm

Hey Patrick,

Good question. I used subdomains because it carries a higher weight than a subdirectory for keywords. I’ve heard mixed things on that “separate site” issue like you mentioned, my personal belief is that it isn’t true, just because it wouldn’t make sense for it to be true, and Google is smart enough to do the right thing. But really I have no hard evidence on that so I could be wrong. Subdomains are a real pain to manage on the server side, so for that reason I’m not sure I’d do it again, but in terms of SEO I still think it’s a good move. Hope it helps!
Brian

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How To Use Domain Names To Improve Your Google Rankings

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