Did you get an email from somebody trying to sell you a domain name, like landscapingohio.com, and you happened to be a landscaper in Ohio, and you think that buying that domain name might help you rank on Google to generate more leads? Well, you may be right, but often when people ask me, Hey, should I buy all these different domain names that have my keyword and city name in them? My answer is typically, probably not. In this episode, I'm going to share with you the reason why owning a bunch of domain names may just create more waste and expense for you and may not actually help you rank higher on Google unless it's done exactly correctly. My name's Jack Jostes and welcome to the landscapers guide to modern sales and marketing. In this show, we help lawn and landscape contractors get found online by the right customers. And in today's episode, I'm going to share a kind of technical response about SEO search engine optimization. And if you'd like to learn more, I have a really easy to read book that explains all this stuff that landscapers love. It's an Amazon bestseller, but you can get it for free from my website LandscapingBook.com. All you have to do is pay for shipping. So grab it at LandscapingBook.com and let's dig into the answer of, should I buy a bunch of different keyword, rich domain names for my landscaping company?
When it comes to choosing your domain name for your business and deciding whether or not you should buy additional domain names. I believe it comes down to three key things. The first one is domain authority. The second one is branding. And the third one is what is your website, maintenance and hosting budget. And how much time do you really want to spend doing those things? So first let's talk about domain authority. And before we geek out on domain authority, I want to share a story with you. I live in a small town and there's a coffee shop. And there's a group of guys who I think these guys may have been drinking coffee together for like 20 years every morning they get together. I don't know, uh, for the 12 years that I've lived here. I see these guys every single time I go to the coffee shop and one time I was there and one of them asked the table.
If they knew a repair person, I can't remember exactly what it was. Another guy took out a piece of paper, wrote down someone's name and phone number and gave him the paper. Let's just pretend that he wrote down Joe and a phone number. And I'll bet the other guy called Joe and hired him because that referral came from somebody. He knew somebody that he liked and somebody that he trusted the internet is the same way in the sense that Google wants whatever they show you. They want to trust it. They want to trust that whatever they rank on their first page is valuable. It's not going to have malware or hack your website. It's going to be relevant. And one of the key ways that they establish trust is through links.
Does The Domain Name Have Good Domain Authority?
When one website links to another website, it passes what's called domain authority. Now the more powerful the first website is linking to the other one. The bigger, the impact it'll have, like if you got a referral from a family member about a piece of hunting gear that you, that they've used for years and years and years, it would have likely more weight than it would if you just read an online review and only one person left an online review. Right. See what I mean? So this makes up a score called domain authority. It's created by a company called Moz that has a software, we use it here at Ramblin Jackson for all our SEO reporting and things. So domain authority is essentially a score of how, how many and how, what are the quality of the links pointing to your website? And the reason that this is so important in deciding if you're going to buy a domain name or not is because if somebody sells you a domain name that has no domain authority, then it's going to have no SEO value for you.
As an example, I build websites for landscapers. That's one of the primary services that we do at Ramblin Jackson. I could, I looked at the domain name, landscapingwebsites.com is available. Hey, maybe I should buy that. Huh? But you know, you know what? People might be Googling it, but in order for that to rank on Google, look, this, this has zero links. No, one's mentioning it. If I compare it to my current website, landscapersguide.com. You can see that my domain authority is currently at this time. It's a 27. It's kind of powerful. It's, I've got over 5,000 links pointing to my website. Many of them are very powerful and relevant to what I do. And I'm able to rank on Google pretty easily for the keywords that I want. So D so in order for this other website to get to that point, it would need a domain of 27, which means that it would need, I don't know, thousands, hundreds, dozens, at least powerful links pointing to it. And why wouldn't anyone link to that? Right. So that's the first one is, does the domain that you're thinking of buying have any domain authority?
Does The Domain Name Fit Your Company's Branding?
The second thing that I want you to think about is branding. And I would really prioritize this over, SEO you, in my opinion, you should own your business name.com. That would be the best thing. So if you have Larry's Landscaping of Ohio, let's pretend that's your business name. You should buy larryslandscapingofohio.com, right? Or if, if your business is called the cut guys, you should own thecutguys.com or you get the idea here because you're going to use this on probably your email. Your email is going to be hosted there. So you want to be able to email it, your domain name. It's going to be on your signage, your vehicles, your business card, and it should sound and look cool. So I would prioritize branding over really anything else.
What Is Your Website Maintenance and Hosting Budget?
Now, if you're at a crossroads where you're either starting a new business or you're rebranding, you're thinking of changing your domain name. Sure. It might be more helpful to have a keyword in there. Like if you change your name from Larry's yards to Larry's landscape design, I can tell you that people are Googling landscape design, way more than they are Googling yards and, and therefore having larryslandscapedesign.com that would help having those keywords in your domain name would help from SEO standpoint, as long as you knew it was going to be a long term decision where you're going to be building links back to that site. Over time, it's like a fruit tree. The third thing I want you to think about is your maintenance budget, because simply owning, you know, landscapingohio.com, owning that domain name and redirecting it to your current website.
That's not going to, that's not actually going to pass any value to you from an SEO standpoint. It would only be valuable if you actually hosted, designed, developed, hosted, a separate website for landscapingohio.com. And then, and then built links to it and maintained it and made it a site worth building links to, but I say, screw that, you know, focus on your one main website and build links to it. So those are the three, the top three things to consider when you're buying a domain name, or when you are thinking of additional domain names that you're probably going to get emails all the time. People trying to sell you domain names. And this is the thought process to go through. I get them all the time myself. Now, there are times where it makes sense to have other domain names, for instance, that have nothing to do with SEO.
If you want to learn more about how to get started with digital marketing, what you should do first, how does SEO actually work? Should you do social media before you build your website or after, or at the same time? I wrote an Amazon bestselling book on this topic called Get FOUND Online, which you can grab at LandscapingBook.com. Now you see what I did there. I own the website and the domain name, LandscapingBook.com. And now I'm able to mention it in my podcast. I was actually on TV one time and I told people to go there. So LandscapingBook.com is really easy to remember. So you can buy domain names like that, and either, host a website there. Or if you go to jackjostes.com, I just redirect that domain name to the, about my bio page on my main website.
So those are, those are some other things that you can do, with your domain names. And I will warn you that when you buy a domain name, yes, you should pay the extra eight or $12 a year to own the .info, .biz, .net... whatever else they're going to sell you when you're checking out by the .info version of your domain name before somebody else does. All right. So hopefully this was helpful to you. I hope you enjoyed today's show. And if you did, make sure that you check out a free copy of my book from LandscapingBook.com. And this will, all you have to do is pay for shipping and I'll send you some cool videos, too. Thanks so much for watching this video and checking out today's episode. I look forward to talking to you next week.