What is link building? Link building in layman terms is basically a high authority relevant website placing a link in the text (anchor text) or as a URL on their website that points back to your website. This shows Google that your website is a high authority relevant site that needs to be ranked higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages.)
Why are backlinks important for a real estate investing website? Well, Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving and at this time there are many ranking factors it uses to rank a site. However, link building still remains to be the number one ranking factor for Googles algorithm. So, the more high authority backlinks a website has the higher up it will rank.
A real estate investor can build links through time, effort, and taking massive action. After the Google Penguin update in April 2012, the focus on link building has taken a massive change in direction from being based on quantity to quality.
This change is why link building now takes more time and a little bit more elbow grease than the golden ages prior to 2012.
In this article, I will go into detail on the top 5 link building strategies for real estate investing,and educate you on how to properly use these tactics in the real estate investing niche.
1. Guest Posting Using Bridge Content
One off-page SEO strategy used for growing organic rankings and referral traffic is guest posting. Guest posting entails a webmaster (owner of a website) reaching out to other webmasters in the same or relevant niche with an offer of creating high-quality valuable content for their website. In exchange, the author of the guest post typically receives a link in the context of the article or in an author bio. Outside of the standard practice is guest posting using bridge content, this strategy requires some creativity. Bridge content guest posting is where a webmaster finds a niche not directly associated with their own. Who then creates an article that is beneficial to the not directly associated niches site but still mentions their own topic. Think in terms of a “sales coach website” writing a guest post on “having a successful sales career” for a career website.
2. Creating Linkable Assets
A linkable asset is a fantastic piece of content that is created on your real estate investing website that other webmasters cannot afford to not link out to. This is an excellent strategy for real estate investors because of how important knowledge is in this field. The more educated a real estate investor the more money he/she will make and the more links their content will receive.
3. Link Reclamation Tactic
Reclamation of links that were once linking out to a page on your real estate investing website is the link reclamation tactic. Websites lose backlinks every day. Especially if they have had 404 errors in the past or broken pages on their site. Imagine if websites never lost any backlinks at all they would have a much stronger backlink profile, rank higher in the SERPs, and get a lot more clicks. The truth is any investor webmaster can reclaim these links. Using Ahrefs a webmaster can:
- Pull a list of lost backlinks
- Check the pages of the lost links for 404 errors or old outdated content
- Recreate and update the content
- Politely remind the webmasters that were once linking out of your newly updated piece of content that is the best on the internet.
- Celebrate with your friends from all the link juice you have gained.
Link reclamation is a proven strategy that will generate near instantaneous results for real estate investors with established websites.
4. Vendor Links
As a real estate investor, we understand how many moving pieces there are from marketing for leads to closing with a respectable title agency or closing attorney. A byproduct of all the moving pieces is a lot of suppliers that we pay for marketing, sales, repairs, inspections, agents for selling/buying, and title agencies/attorneys for closings. Did you know that nearly all of these respectable businesses and individuals have websites for their services? These websites are a great source of vendor links.
- First, make a list of all your vendors/suppliers and their respective websites.
- Second, add in their personal contact information and names
- Thirdly, reach out to these vendors offering a testimonial for their website with a link back to your site.
This works 99.99% of the time because no sensible business or individual would pass up a written statement of their stupendous work.
5. Broken Link Building Using Competitors Websites
Broken link building is a strategy used time and time again by SEOs throughout the world wide web. Traditionally, webmasters use google search operators to generate a large list of resources pages. Next using a broken link checker tool these webmasters scour the pages for 404 errors (broken links.) In which case they would reach out and let the owner of the page know they have a broken link. Make them aware of their updated version of the broken link and in some cases, they will replace the broken link with yours. This strategy does work but has been used and abused by so many that the return on the investment of time is much lower than it once was.
A more effective use of this strategy is once a broken link is found and the webmaster is contacted. Run the broken page through Ahrefs and check it for any valuable backlinks. The next step would be to run the URL through the web archives, recreate the page, and contact the webmasters of the valuable links informing them of your updated piece of content. This at the very least doubles a webmasters chances of gaining a link back to their site.
Now that you know the top 5 link building strategies for real estate investing. Go out and begin building high-quality backlinks that generate massive amounts of traffic for years to come.
Author Bio:
Hi, my name is David Freudenberg I am an investor and active SEOer in the sunshine state of Florida. I am the owner of DPF Property Solutions LLC at davidbuyshousesflorida.com