SEO and Link Building for Real Estate Investors: Grow Your Website’s Authority
Link Building for Real Estate Investors
Struggling to rank your real estate investment website on the first page of Google?
It may be the case where you need link building for real estate investors website to give it that final push.
Of course, the first thing you should check is the on-page SEO of your real estate company’s website. Make sure that your website is structured correctly, has quality content, rich media, and optimized meta tags. On-site optimizations are 70% of the game but if this still isn’t enough you’ll likely need to invest in some off-page SEO campaigns.
Your site’s authority is significantly affected by the quantity and quality of websites linking back to it. Build backlinks and overtime your website will begin to rank in the organic and map sections. Link building for real estate investors is king.
Links are what will really differentiate your site from competitions’ (in Google’s eyes). However, has the best combo of authority links, citations, and mentions around the web will likely win.
The most important thing to remember is that you don’t just want 1000s of garbage links from unknown websites. This will hurt your rankings and potentially drop your entire site from Google’s search results.
Google’s algorithms have become increasingly good at finding spammy links so it’s important to build a clean profile.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text that makes up a hyperlink on a website. When clicked, this link will direct users to another website or another page on the same website.
Anchor text plays an important role in backlinks as well as the internal links on your own website (from one page to another).
Anchor text is crucial for SEO because it describes (to Google) what the page linked to is about.
Links labeled as ‘real estate investors’ tells Google that the linked website is about real estate investing. A link with text such as, ‘sell your home fast’ is much more powerful than ‘click here’ and will help you to rank for that specific keyword when users search for it in Google.
At the same time, the distribution of anchor text is important to authority. You want to make sure that no single keyword is overused in the anchor text pointing back to your website. Over-optimized anchor text can get your website penalized — hurting overall rankings.
This is why it’s important to analyze high ranking competitor websites to get a sense of their anchor ratios.
Build similar anchor ratios to those of the high ranking websites in the real estate niche and your website will be bound to rank high as well.
We suggest reverse engineering anchor text ratios using tools such as ahrefs.com and majestic.com.
Let’s cover some of the various categories of anchor text:
- Target Anchor Text: These links contain the precise keywords you’re looking to rank for such as ‘cash for homes in Detroit mi’. These anchors are very strong but should be used sparingly in most cases.
- URL Anchor Text: These are just raw URL links back to your website such as www.yourbusiness.com. URL anchors are common for local business directories
- Brand Anchor Text: This is an anchor with the business name such as ‘Detroit Realty Group’.
- Miscellaneous Anchor Text: This encompasses any text that doesn’t fit into the previously mentioned categories. You’ll find common words such as ‘click here’ and ‘website’ as the link text.
How to Get High-Quality Links for Your Real Estate Investment Business
What makes a link high-quality in the first place?
Well, when it comes to link building for real estate investors there are a multitude of factors but it can be boiled down into two metrics; domain and page authority.
The power of a backlink depends on the strength of the website and the particular page linking back to you.
The strength is determined by the same factors that improve your own SEO authority; number and quality of backlinks, website structure, content depth, domain age, etc.
Get links from authoritative websites and some of that authority will pass to you.
Here are some links you’ll want to build out for your real estate investment website for better rankings:
- Directory, Social & Citations: These are the first links you should build out for your company. Social, directory, and citations are foundational because they are links that all real businesses build. Make sure that your NAP and website link are on every related website possible (Facebook, Yelp, BBB, etc.)
- Local Associations: Partake in your local associations and they’ll likely provide links to your business on their own websites. These associations could be the local chamber of commerce, networking groups, local trade shows, charities, etc.).
- Information Content Building: You can take link building to the next level using informative content pieces. Reach out to your local newspapers, radio stations, etc. and write a free piece of content for them. You can do the same thing with industry blogs and forums. Make interesting content online and people will naturally share and link to it.
- Reverse Engineer Competition: Use the above mentioned tools such as ahrefs.com to analyze your competition’s link strategies. This is a great way to find outreach opportunities to get your links on the same sites.
Let’s look at each one of these in a bit more detail.
Directory & Social Links
Links from these types of websites are ‘low hanging fruit’ and should be the first thing any business focuses on.
Directory and social links don’t hold much power in terms of ranking but they do build trust with Google.
In the real estate investor SEO community, these links are known as pillow links because they help to increase generic anchor text ratios to avoid Google penalization.
Platforms such as Google My Business, Bing & Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, BBB, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other sites are great places for links back to your website and NAP citations.
These links create a foundational blueprint for your off-page SEO campaign so make sure not to skip this step.
Google wants to know that you have an established identity across the web so will be looking for these types of links alongside some of your more targeted anchor links.
Local Associations
It’s highly likely your investment firm is involved in multiple groups and industry associations in the local area. These are great opportunities to get strong, local links pointing back to your website.
Many associations such as the Chamber of Commerce will list members on their websites with contact info and links to business websites.
You might also be involved in networking groups and or charities which may also have link opportunities for you.
Business Affiliates & Shoulder Industries
Other opportunities for links exist among business affiliates and other industries associated with real estate.
Look for relevant businesses to team up with and list each other on your websites (it’s a win win).
Scholarships
An advanced link acquisition technique is by offering scholarship opportunities to local schools and colleges.
Offer $500+ to students who meet certain qualifications and reach out to educational institutions to list your scholarship details on their site.
This method will cost some money of course but is a great way to get multiple links from notoriously authoritative domains (.edu websites).
Competitive Link Acquisition
Leverage competitive spy tools to reverse engineer who is linking to your top competitors.
It is highly likely that is a business is linking to your competitors they will also be open to linking to you.
Competitive backlink reports can be a gold mine for link outreach opportunities so we highly suggest doing some research.
Content Marketing
Another advanced method for acquiring backlinks to your real estate investment website is through content marketing.
Consider creating viral content around local news, interviews, and industry reports which you can easily share local bloggers, news websites, and forums.
Upload these pieces either directly to your site and begin outreaching to local businesses or write guest posts to place directly on the prospects websites.
The internet runs on content so much businesses will be happy to accept free and engaging content in exchange for a link back to your website.
Parting Words
As you may have noticed, there’s a ton of ways to get creative with link building.
Most of the SEO for real estate investing process isn’t rocket science but it does take time, effort, creativity, and testing to get right.
Fortunately, we’ve already discovered what works best for the real estate investment industry and can apply the same strategies for you.
Reach out to us today to schedule a call where we’ll layout an entire blueprint for your real estate investment SEO campaign.
