When real estate brokers think about their websites, they typically think of the parent website that is the brokerage domain, the agent websites, and maybe team websites. This standard is smart. The brokerage website becomes the hub and the agent websites become the spokes. We call this website topology.
Website Topology Strategy - Hub and Spoke
Some enterprise brokerage firms have a website topology strategy. It is a hub and spoke network of websites that need to be properly connected. The hub of the enterprise firm is the broker website. The spokes are primarily co-branded agent websites, but also include regional websites or sub-sites of the brokerage like office websites, team websites, city name websites, neighborhood websites, and single listing websites.
If you look carefully at the link-beds at the bottom of the listing detail pages of the top sites, you will see that they have created subsites (subdomains) which cross link across the hub and spoke sites. If done correctly, these spoke websites take on a life of their own in search results and provide valuable information to the consumer.
Take a look at one of Nautilent's customer websites - The Group Real Estate in Ft. Collins Colorado. The hub is TheGroupInc.com. In the main navigation at the top of the page, you will see the word Steamboat. This is a different website that represents a spoke off of the hub. The domain is different - https://thegrouprealestatess.com/. All of the links on the subsites are canonical back to the hub site. This is key to search engine optimization as it uses the canonical process to tell search engines that the original content is on this other website so neither page gets demoted for duplicate content. Search engines to want not want to rank copied content. Our top customer using this strategy is RE/MAX Results. They have 100s of community pages that all link to each other to perfectly drive search engine optimization across the entire network of websites.
When property deployed, the hub website and the community pages and agent pages combine to create a network effect that search engines love. New sites in the network see immediate benefits.
Having separate domain names for the agent and team spoke sites is critical. We recommend that all agents and teams be given custom domains that work together with the main site.
If you'd like our team to create a custom website topology strategy for your enterprise brokerage, please reach out!