Backlinks, inbound links pointing to your website from another one, are one of the most important ranking factors for search engines.
The more relevant and high-quality your backlinks are, the more likely they are to have a positive impact on your search engine rankings.
In this article, I’ll provide information on what a high-quality backlink is with some strategies you can use to get them for your real estate website.
If you want us to do this for you, check out our local link building services.
What is a high-quality real estate backlink?
Our definition of a high-quality backlink is one that improves your search engine rankings and your website’s organic traffic.
There’s a lot that goes into determining backlink quality. Many real estate SEO professionals use metrics like domain authority to analyze the quality of their backlink profile or find direction for their backlink strategy.
The way we approach this, based on our 10 years of manual link building experience, we’ve found these to be the most important in getting high-quality real estate backlinks:
- Anchor text relevance.
- Page content relevance and quality of the website linking to you.
- Domain quality and relevance of the website linking to you.
By contrast, low-quality, spammy backlinks are usually from paid sources, directories, forums, or other pages that provide little value.
For real estate websites, this means that you want to get backlinks on websites that potential real estate target audience is reading. In the world of real estate, this seems broad because everyone buys or rents a place to live at some point in their lives, but you want the websites to link to you as an authority on the topic of real estate.
This could mean a news site references some commentary from you, or a travel blogger references a “best places to stay” post on your blog.
Additionally, because you’re trying to rank for keywords locally, backlinks from websites in your local area would be considered more relevant links than, for example, a link from a national news outlet.
This is because Google counts local backlinks as local “votes” for your website. There are a number of local link building strategies you can leverage to win backlinks locally, but we’ll give you the 3 best strategies for real estate websites below.
3 real estate link building tactics for real estate backlinks
1. Local Digital PR
Digital PR is exactly what it sounds like. It’s PR, but focused on digital outlets, and it’s where the highest quality links come from.
This link building tactic is great because, in addition to getting backlinks from local media outlets, you can also get coverage for your real estate agency! This means you may get some referral traffic from these links!
It’s also a great way to build awareness in your local community.
For example, our law firm client got interviewed on TV as a result of our digital PR outreach.
It also came with some local backlinks!
Journalists love data, so if you can latch onto some kind of data story with a local angle, you can improve your chances of landing coverage locally.
Almost all of our stories include some kind of data angle.
Here’s how we come up with ideas:
First, think about a specific outcome their audience is trying to accomplish that’s tied to one of the following emotions:
- Awe 🤯
- Surprise 😲
- Anger 😡
- Anxiety 😰
- Interest 🤔
The story above, for example, is tied to anxiety. People want to be safe, and they want their families to be safe, so a map of car accident data makes a lot of sense for a story about safe travels around the holidays, which was the angle we went with.
Here are some ways you can use data to create stories that are more tied to the subject matter of real estate:
- Build an Annual Market Report: Compile data on housing or real estate market trends, including median home prices, inventory levels, and days on the market to create an annual market report for your local area. Use this report to provide insights into market conditions and predictions for the upcoming year.
- Build a Neighborhood Spotlight Report: Analyze housing market data for different neighborhoods within your target area and create spotlight reports highlighting key statistics, such as average home prices, school ratings, and amenities. This can help prospective buyers better understand the unique characteristics of each neighborhood.
- Conduct a Homebuyer Demographics Study: Conduct a survey or analyze existing data to identify trends in homebuyer demographics, such as age, income, and preferences. Use this data to create informative infographics or reports that can help guide your marketing strategies and target specific buyer segments more effectively.
- Seller’s Market vs. Buyer’s Market Analysis: Compare historical data on housing market conditions to identify periods of seller’s markets versus buyer’s markets in your area. Use this analysis to provide insights into the current state of the market and offer advice to clients on the best strategies for buying or selling homes.
- Seasonal Housing Trends: Analyze data on seasonal fluctuations in the housing market, such as changes in home prices, inventory levels, and buyer activity throughout the year. Use this data to create seasonal guides or marketing campaigns that capitalize on peak buying or selling seasons.
Once you have your idea, publish your report, study, or analysis on your website with images, infographics, and other sharable forms of content that you can send to journalists.
For our law firm client, we just made a simple data map for our study.
Once your content is ready, write a press release that puts your study into a story format and send it with an email that looks a bit like this:
Hey {{first:guys}},
My name is [Your Name] and I’m the [Your Title] at [Your Business].
I’m emailing you today because we just finished a study about [what your study shows and why it matters to their readers].
Since you’ve reported on this kind of thing before, I thought it would interest you.
I’ve attached the press release below, but you can check out the full study here on our blog: [Link]
[Your signature]
After you’ve gotten a story published, share it on social media! This can help you build relationships with journalists to further your digital marketing efforts later on.
2. Local Guest Blogging
I’ve written about guest blogging in detail before, but here, we’ll run through how to do this locally for real estate websites.
Guest blogging is a very common link building strategy for real estate agents where you reach out to niche websites and bloggers, pitch content ideas, and write the whole article for them with a link to your site inside that article.
With this tactic, you can hand-pick the sites you want to write for, choose the link placement, and control the anchor text, which is a pretty big ranking factor.
To find local websites to pitch, we can use Google Maps.
When doing this, you want to find businesses where your knowledge of subject matter offers some sort of value.
This doesn’t mean you need to pitch real estate blogs, real estate industry outlets, or online magazines for realtors. If you look for these, you’re likely to only find websites owned by competing firms.
Remember, you’re trying to write on websites that your target audience might be reading. In real estate, this is very loosely defined because you target much of the population. This means you can write about topics tied to real estate in other niches to get your links because there’s an overlap of audience.
Other local businesses often make for great targets because they get lots of value out of content. Maybe you could write for lawn care websites about the impact of a healthy-looking yard on home sales.
If we follow this example, we’d enter something like “CITY lawn care” into Google Maps.
From here, you can visit the websites and check if they have a blog. Willis Lawn Services, for example, does:
Finally, you can find their email address and reach out to the website owner with a pitch like this:
- {Article Title}
- {Article Title}
- {Article Title}
To give you an idea of my writing style and quality, here are some samples:
- {link}
- {link}
- {link}
Can I send a draft over for you to review and consider publishing on {site}? Let me know, thanks! Cheers, Nick
After that, write your article, send it over with a link in the body to your target page (ideally with something close to your target keyword as the anchor), and follow-up until it’s published!
3. Local Resource Pages
According to Backlinko, resource page link building is “the practice of building backlinks from pages that have curated lists of links to external websites (resource pages).”
This campaign works really well because these pages are built just to link to stuff.
They even exist on a local level! Here’s an example of a resource page from a Tampa website:
To find pages like this in the real estate niche, you can combine some Google search operators with your real estate keywords. For example, if you’re a real estate agent in Tampa, Florida, some of these might be worth trying:
- real estate inurl:resources.html inurl:tampa
- moving inurl:helpful-links intitle:tampa
- tampa real estate inurl:links
Finding prospects locally can be tough if you’re trying to scale this up, but don’t give up. Different combinations of search terms pull up different results.
You can even try other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo to find a larger variety of results that you might not find through Google since their algorithms are different.
When you’ve found a good page target, send them an email like this:
Hey [First Name]!
I was looking for some information on [Topic] today and found this page: [URL]
Loved the resources you put there for [Reason]!
Anyway, I realized that I recently published a blog post about [Related Topic]: [URL].
It covers [Description].
I thought it would fit nicely under the [Section Name] section of your page.
If you like it, would you mind adding a link to it?
Hope to hear back, thanks!
[Signature]
Like digital PR, this strategy usually works best with high-quality content, but if your home page provides true value, you may be able to get links directly to that.
Conclusion
Real estate backlinks are generally earned through some form of content marketing, such as digital PR, guest blogging, or pitching content to resource pages.
The factor that many real estate agents don’t take into consideration, however, is the locality of the backlink. Backlinks from websites based in your local area are a better investment of your time because these have more influence over local rankings. This includes Google Business Profile rankings.
If any of this sounds overwhelming, consider outsourcing your link building with our link building services or digital PR services!
Good luck out there!
