Link Building For Real Estate Investors [Build Smarter, Rank Higher]
Are you a real estate investor or a real estate related business?
Are you wanting to generate more leads organically?
Do you believe SEO is a great way to generate highly motivated leads?
I’m not finished, more questions that you are hopefully answering yes to.
Do you believe that links build authority and are beneficial to help your “MONEY site, or acquisition site rank higher on search engines?
Do you want some legit ways to build more links?
OK, now I will say it…
If you answered yes then you MUST keep reading, RIGHT?!?!?
Legit Guide on How to Build Backlinks for Real Estate Investors Successfully
One of the primary ingredients to a successful website is a foundation of high-quality backlinks. In my experience as a real estate investor, there are two main pillars when it comes to the health of my website: content and backlinks. If you get traffic to your site, but the content stinks and doesn’t convert your visitors into leads, you’ve got an issue. However, it is extremely common for website owners, especially in the real estate niche, to develop a website with decent content, but absolutely no one knows about it. It’s just sitting out there on the twelfth page of Google with no chance of ever being seen.
So how do you climb the rankings and get to a spot where your website will get noticed? The short answer is backlinks. You must have an abundance of authoritative websites linking back to your site, because these links serve as “votes” in Google’s eyes.
But how exactly do you secure these links from high-quality sites? It’s not like Forbes or Yahoo! simply link to everyone who asks them. If you’re wondering where to start on your link-building journey, you’ve come to the right place. This article will explain my favorite strategies to build high-quality backlinks and citations that will improve your rankings as soon as possible!
Value Exchange
Before we get into the actual link-building strategies, you must understand a fundamental principle behind every legitimate link you will build. For any website owner or blogger to link to your site, they must receive some sort of value in return.
What we’re going to focus on here, and what I recommend you always strive for, is to let your content provide so much value that people will want to link to you. Most articles include links to other sites that support their points or allow their traffic to dig deeper on a topic.
That is exactly where you want to come in. Your goal should be to write relevant and informative articles that serve as a backlink magnet for your site. This is how SEO was intended. Unfortunately, many websites have adopted black-hat tactics to hack their way to the top. However, they are often penalized by Google, which you’ll never have to worry about when using these strategies.
Now let’s get into some link building!
HARO (Help A Reporter Out)
HARO is one of my best sources of backlinks. It is a service that connects journalists with experts that can provide commentary on the articles they are writing. Every time a writer chooses to use your feedback, they give you a backlink. And these aren’t wimpy backlinks, either. We’re talking Better Homes & Gardens, Apartment Therapy, Fortune Builders, and more. HARO is an excellent source for generating high-octane backlinks.
Keys To Success When Using HARO
HARO is a great place to start for real estate investors, especially those that already have some experience renovating houses. This is because journalists often reach out wanting expert opinions about home renovations or general real estate topics, and experienced investors can answer some of these questions in their sleep.
When writing responses to queries on HARO, it is crucial to write specific and unique answers. Most of the queries are seeking expert commentary, so generic content that anyone could write after a quick Google search likely won’t be selected. It is best to stick to topics that you can write intelligently about. This will increase your success rate and also decrease your frustration.
Drawbacks Of HARO
The main drawback of using HARO for link building is that it is highly competitive. Many people know about it, including an abundance of real estate investors, so your pitches are often competing with numerous other pitches from people who are just as eager to get backlinks as you are.
So your goal should be to write responses that will stand out from the rest and send them as quickly as you can. I try to respond within thirty minutes of the requests coming out. It sounds crazy, but it may be the difference between being selected and someone else beating you out.
Guest Posting
Let’s say you have a ton of great blog post ideas, but you don’t have any traffic to your site, so no one ever sees what you publish. Guest posting might be a great fit for you! The idea is to locate established blogs that will allow you to write content for them. The value exchange here is pretty obvious. They get new content for their blog, and you get a backlink to your site, since most blogs that allow guest posting will allow you to embed a link into your article.
How To Find Guest Posting Opportunities
Any blog that openly allows guest posts will usually have a page named “Write For Us” or something similar. Knowing that, you can get creative with Google search operators to pull a list of sites that have these types of pages. One example would be something like this: real estate intitle:”write for us”. That would pull the top pages with “write for us” in the title that mention real estate.
And you don’t have to stop at just real estate. If you have experience with home improvement, real estate investing, or any other related topics, search for those as well and pitch your expertise! The key to filling your pipeline with guest posting opportunities is pitching to more blogs than you will be able to write for. This is because most candidates will not work out, so you want to play the percentages and have a high number of prospects.
Using Your Blog As A Link Magnet
As a real estate investor, it is difficult to attract a large number of high-quality backlinks to your homepage. This goes back to our initial rule of the value exchange. For most site owners to link to you, they must believe that the link will provide value to their traffic. Unfortunately, linking to a page that says, “We Buy Houses” or “Sell Your House Fast” does not provide much unique value.
HARO and guest posting are methods to direct backlinks to your homepage, but most of your other links will likely point to your blog. And that’s okay because you can use what’s called the “Middleman Method.” “Since most website owners will likely not want to link to your homepage or other money pages, you can publish informative content on your blog and attract backlinks to those articles,” said Jordan Fulmer of Momentum Property Solutions, a We Buy Houses Company in Huntsville, AL. “Then, using internal links, you can pass the link equity coming into your blog (the Middleman) onto your homepage. This will increase the authority of your homepage, even though the majority of your backlinks don’t point directly at it.”
How to Build Broken Link Building
Have you ever been reading an article and clicked on one of its links, only to see a 404 error and a message that says, “This page no longer exists?” That is a broken link. For most people, this error is just a nuisance. But you should see it as a link-building opportunity.
There are numerous web pages and articles out there with an abundance of high-quality backlinks pointing to them, but the page has become broken at some point. Often, the people linking to the broken page have no idea it doesn’t work anymore.
Tools Needed For Broken Link Building
You will need a tool such as Ahrefs to obtain all of the data you’ll need to complete your broken link-building campaign. This tool will allow you to search for relevant broken pages, filter them by SEO metrics such as referring domain and domain rating, and then generate a list of all the pages linking to them. You can also use archive.org to see the original article. Although your goal should be to produce a piece of content that is even better than the original, it will help you to see the angle of the original article and maybe why so many pages were linking to it.
Skyscraper Technique
Have you ever performed a search on Google and clicked on one of the results, and thought, “How in the world is this ranking on Google?” The fact that there are pages like that out there with an abundance of pages linking to them is the premise behind the skyscraper technique.
The skyscraper technique for building backlinks is very similar to broken link building. The main difference is that instead of looking for broken pages to acquire links from, the goal is to find lackluster or outdated articles that can be improved upon. Once you’ve written your article, the idea is the same. You must reach out to each site owner that is linking to the old article and request that they link to yours instead.
Things To Remember With The Skyscraper Technique
With any link-building strategy that requires outreach, you must have an angle that you will be pitching from that will actually convince your audience to take action and link to you. With broken link building, that angle is very easy to determine. They are linking to a page that doesn’t exist anymore, and you have an updated article to replace it with. It’s pretty straightforward.
However, with the skyscraper technique, you are asking your audience to go and edit their page just because you think your article is somehow better than the one they are currently linking to. And it most likely is. Sadly, however, most people simply won’t be convinced to go back and edit their page just because you reached out to them. They’ve moved on and simply don’t care that much.
Keys For Success Using The Skyscraper Technique
Although it is a little more challenging to secure links using this method, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include it in your link-building efforts. It just means you need to be aware of it on the front end and develop your plan accordingly. You need to find pages that have serious problems. Here are a few examples of pages that might be good candidates to “steal” links from:
- Pages with incorrect or outdated information
- Pages that do not match the intent of the links pointing to them
- Pages that are incredibly uninformative or do not have near enough content to be useful
When creating your new article that you will eventually promote to acquire backlinks, you must keep in mind that the quality of the article will heavily influence your success. If you create a highly informative article that reads well and is visually appealing, you likely will not have much difficulty attracting new backlinks. If your article is mediocre, however, you will have a hard time convincing anyone to link to it. I mean, the entire goal of this strategy is to create something better than what they are linking to, remember?
Resource Page Link Building
I was not aware of this before I began doing SEO, but there are many sites on the web that have a “resources” or “links” page intended to link out to external resources related to the site’s content. One example might be if you have an article that gives tips for success for landlords. You could locate resource pages on sites related to real estate or real estate investing and pitch your resource to them.
The great part about requesting links from resource pages is that the site owner does not have to replace any of the already existing links. They are always on the lookout for helpful resources to recommend, so if your article fits the intent of their page, they will happily add it to their list.
Tools For Locating Resource Pages
Finding resource page candidates is similar to searching for guest blogging opportunities. The best place to start is using search operators within Google’s search engine that contain keywords you are looking for. Here is an example: “real estate” inurl:resources.html. There are several varieties of these search terms. Check out the Ahrefs article on resource page link building for a more complete explanation.
When you run a search, there will likely be many potential candidates in the search results. It will be helpful to use a scraper software or extension to scrape all of the URLs from the list. Then you will want to begin vetting the list of resource pages.
First, you will want to verify that these pages are actually linking to external pages. Otherwise, the chances of them linking to you will be very slim. To streamline this check, I recommend installing Screaming Frog Spider. You can copy and paste all of the URLs you want to check, and it will crawl all of them in a matter of minutes and output helpful metrics, such as the number of external links. You can then filter out the pages that are not linking to many external resources.
After that, you will need to manually visit each of the remaining pages to check if your article would be a good fit for their site. If so, you can reach out to them and request to be added!
Local Real Estate Links & Directory Citations
Acquiring nationwide links will undoubtedly increase the domain rating of your website, but as a real estate investor, you likely want to rank locally. To gain authority in your market, it is essential to gain links from local businesses and organizations.
How To Get Local Real Estate Links
An easy way to acquire local links is to join organizations such as your local chamber of commerce. Organizations like this often give members a bio page that includes contact information for their business, including a backlink to their site.
Some websites publish lists such as “Best House Buyers in Nashville, TN” and give a link to each of the companies’ sites. To locate these lists, a good place to start is by searching on Google by using variations of the list you want to be included in. Another way to find them is to look at your competitors’ backlink profiles and look up the sites that are linking to them.
Understanding how to build Citations for real estate websites is a key component to ensure your website ranks higher and you get better leads i.e. highly motivated sellers, right?
Directory Citations
There is an abundance of directories on the web that allow businesses to create a profile and list their information. Some examples of these directories include Yelp, YellowPages, and ShowMeLocal. These are just a few among many. Instead of manually creating a profile on each one, you can subscribe to a service like Yext that will syndicate your information across a wide variety of directories. This will allow people to find you in more places and send more backlinks to your website.
Final Thoughts On Link Building
As I’ve already mentioned, building high-quality backlinks pointing to your site is crucial if you want to rank on Google and get more organic traffic. It takes time, effort, and patience, but it offers massive rewards. The leads you will get from your website will often be the best leads you will find.
I am a real estate investor myself, and these link-building strategies have worked for me to grow my website quickly and begin ranking on Google for popular search terms. If you do them correctly, you will have no shortage of ideas to generate quality links to your site.
Good luck link-building!