Real Estate Backlinks
Backlinks are critical for any real estate website that wants to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this section, we’ll explore how to build high-quality backlinks for your real estate website to boost your rankings and attract more traffic.
What Are Backlinks and Why Do They Matter?
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. Search engines like Google use backlinks to determine the authority and relevance of a website.
If a website has many high-quality backlinks, it’s considered more authoritative and likely to rank higher in search results.
Backlinks can benefit your real estate website in the following ways:
- Increase your website’s authority and credibility
- Boost your search engine rankings
- Drive more traffic to your website
- Help you establish relationships with other industry influencers
How to Build Backlinks for Real Estate
The first thing about backlinks is that you probably don't even need to think about them.
In fact, if you're thinking about "getting backlinks", you're probably thinking about doing something you shouldn't be doing. That's because getting backlinks is not supposed to be easy.
So focus on the basics, like having a functional and accessible site, and most importantly, having a helpful site that people want to use. A site like that will likely earn backlinks naturally over time, which is the point of backlinks as a ranking factor anyway.
So remember these points to avoid making mistakes with your backlink strategy:
- Easy links are probably not going to help
- Paying for links is definitely not going to help
- Explicitly trading links won't help either
But that's not to say there aren't things you can do to get links. There are! So here's a quick rundown of some proven link building strategies for real estate:
Create High-Quality Content
The first step to building high-quality backlinks is to create valuable, informative, and engaging content that others will want to link to. If your content is bad, then the links you do get will probably be given begrudgingly (or by accident) and even when a search engine finds the linked page, it probably won't rank it highly anyway.
So, you should always aim for your content to be unique, original, and relevant to your target audience.
Here are some tips to help you create high-quality content:
- Conduct research to identify topics your audience is interested in
- Use informative headings, structure, and page layout to make your content more readable
- Use headings, bullet points, paragraphs of varying lengths, images and videos to make your content more visually appealing
- Use data and statistics to support your arguments and claims
What counts as high-quality content for a real estate website?
High-quality content for a real estate website should provide valuable and relevant information to potential homebuyers or sellers. Some examples of high-quality content for a real estate website are:
- Property Listings: Accurate and detailed property listings with high-quality photos, videos, and virtual tours can help potential buyers get a better sense of the property they are interested in.
- Neighborhood Information: Providing information on the neighborhood, such as schools, transportation, shopping, and local amenities, can help buyers make informed decisions about where they want to live.
- Blog Articles: Informative and engaging blog articles on topics related to buying or selling a home, home renovation, decorating, or real estate market trends can attract potential customers to the website and position the website as a helpful resource.
- Expert Advice: Providing advice from real estate experts, such as real estate agents or financial advisors, can demonstrate the website's expertise and authority in the industry.
- Resources and Tools: Providing resources and tools such as mortgage calculators, property valuation tools, or guides on the home buying process can help potential buyers make informed decisions and position the website as a valuable resource.
Overall, high-quality content for a real estate website should aim to inform, educate, and engage potential customers while positioning the website as a helpful resource and building trust and credibility with potential customers.
Reach Out To Other Real Estate Professionals
A great way to build backlinks is through developing real world professional relationships. Often people will be more prone to link to your content when they trust you personally. So do some good old-fashioned networking and get yourself out there.
Here are some tips to help you get started:
- Identify industry influencers who have a large following on social media or a high-authority website
- Reach out to them via email or social media and introduce yourself and your website
- Share blog posts, resources, or pages from your site that you think might be useful or of interest
- Offer to collaborate on events or content
- If you get a mention on their site or social media, ask (nicely) for a link to be added
Provide Guest Content For Other Real Estate Websites
This could really be a specific example of the above, but it's such a great strategy it really deserves its own entry. Guest blogging on other websites in your field, industry or topic area has been an effective way to build relevant backlinks for a long time. And since you do it by offering value in the form of your time and expertise, it definitely falls well within "best practices" for backlink building.
Here are some tips to help you get started:
- Identify industry websites that accept guest posts or other professionals that you have a good relationship with
- Reach out to the website owner or editor and pitch your guest post idea
- Write a high-quality guest post that provides value to the website’s audience
- Include a link to your website in your author bio or within the body of your post
Get Involved In The Community
Participating in local community activities is a great way to build relationships with other businesses and organizations in your area, and it can also help you build high-quality backlinks for your website. The basic idea here is that when you do something newsworthy in your community, there's also a fair chance of getting a link back to your website in any subsequent reporting about it.
There's also the more basic strategy of simply making sure that your business is listed in all appropriate directories.
Here are some ideas:
- Sponsor local events or charities
- Join your local chamber of commerce and get listed on their website
- Get listed in local directories and business listings
- Do periodic searches for mentions of your business and ask for those mentions to be linked if they aren't already
Checking for mentions of your business or site
There are some tools you can use to look around for mentions of your site or business. However, a much simpler way is to use Google Search. Use this search template, replacing the parts in square brackets:
"[YOUR BUSINESS NAME]" -site:[YOUR WEBSITE]
This will show the top results featuring mentions of your business name but excluding any on your own website. Follow through to the sites in the search results and see if the mention of your business has an associated link. If not, contact the webmaster and politely ask them to add one.
However, not all backlinks are equal, and some low-quality or spammy backlinks can actually harm your website's ranking.
Disavowing backlinks
Disavowing backlinks is the process of telling search engines not to consider certain backlinks when evaluating a website's authority or relevance.
By disavowing backlinks, website owners can tell search engines which backlinks they do not want to be associated with.
It's important to note that disavowing backlinks should be done with caution, as it can potentially harm the website's ranking if done incorrectly.
Tracking Your Backlinks
Once you start building backlinks, it’s essential to monitor and analyze them to ensure they’re high-quality and contributing to your website’s SEO.
Here are some tools to help you monitor and analyze your backlinks:
- Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics to track where your website traffic is coming from
- Ahrefs: Get an Ahrefs account and use their backlink tracking tools to see exactly who is linking to you and how
Social Media Backlinks
It’s important to know that social media accounts do not directly impact a website’s SEO. However, how people share your content on social media does matter. If people are linking and sharing your content because they like it, those backlinks will build up. For this reason, there is value in sharing your content on social media sites—assuming your followers like what you’re producing and choose to share it themselves.
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