I’m going to preface this article by saying that link building isn’t the only strategy we’ve used in the Real Estate niche to supercharge rankings, but it’s allowed us to power up all of our pages and drastically improve our rankings for those pages, so we’ll start there.

Link Building in Real Estate

Conventional wisdom dictates that it’s extremely difficult to build links and develop search engine results in the real estate niche. We disagree.

We’ve been earning links in the real estate niche for some time now, and we’ve managed to win some phenomenal exposure and backlinks on some incredible websites.

Think outside the box and look in other friendly industries!

Examples

To start with, I want to show you some tangible links that we’ve built in the industry. These types of links could easily be replicated by any kind of company in the Real Estate niche (agent website, listing site, service provider, B2B, web-development – you name it)

• Hubspot [DA 91] Guest Post – How to Start a Real Estate Business
• LeadPages [DA 76] Content Mention – Top 29 Tips to Generate Real Estate Leads
• This One’s Cool – SellingFearlessly.com [DA 34] Guest Post – The Exact Email I Used To Earn This Guest Post 

• Business2Community.com [DA 84] Guest Post – How to Humanize Sales Process Automation
• Homely.com.au [DA 42] Content Mention – 4 Tips to Get More Leads From Your Website

• Realtrends.com [DA 56] Content Mention – Property Manager Success Tips
• Realtybiznews.com [DA 58] Content Mention – Top 10 Real Estate Marketing Techniques
• Massrealestatenews.com [DA 46] Content Mention – How to Secure Luxury Real Estate Commissions

• McKissock.com [DA 46] Content Mention – How to Get Your Real Estate Posts Seen on Instagram
• Landlordacademy.com [ DA 27] Content Mention – VR could change the future of Real Estate

Strategy 1) Authentic, Scalable Outreach

This is our bread & butter when it comes to building links in Real Estate.

Our process first involves identifying a piece of content we’d like to build links to. In this example, we’re going to promote this article: 13 Free Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies That Work.

Next, we’re going to go through the painstaking task of building out a list of link targets that we believe may be interested in our content. We want to find bloggers talking about Real Estate sales, how they can find more leads, how they can improve their sales game etc.

We can use tools like Ahrefs content explorer to help us:

Our methods of prospecting include; 

1. Competitor research – finding link targets from people who have previously linked to similar content
2. Google research – using advanced search operators to find relevant people talking about our subject
3. Content explorer – using tools like Ahrefs to scan for relevant content that contains certain keywords

Eventually, we should have a nice list of link targets ready. We normally aim for over 100 targets for a single campaign:

Now it’s time to set-up an outreach campaign. We use an extremely powerful outreach tool called Pitchbox to manage all of our campaigns.

We’ll add all of the data from our prospect list, and find other important details such as an accurate email address to contact, and the recipient’s first name.

Once we’ve completed all of that, we can craft our email templates and launch our email campaigns.

Note: At this stage, I’d normally insert an image of the outreach template and approach we’d use, but I’m not going to because it would probably be copied and re-used relentlessly.

Instead, I’m going to give some pointers for your outreach templates;

Some Quick Pointers & Considerations for Email Templates

1. Always try to include the recipient’s first name.
2. Use a succinct introduction and be fun & friendly – I hate overly professional outreach emails for the most part.
3. Be clear & don’t write too much – 3 or 4 paragraphs should suffice.
4. Don’t just talk about yourself, talk about them.
5. Why would they benefit from adding your link? What unique content do you have that their readers might gain from?
6. Is there any way you can help them in return? E.G. Shouting them out on social media, doing an interview for your blog.
7. Always follow up! This is extremely important, 50% of our success comes from follow-ups

Results

So after we’ve started sending out emails, it’s imperative to monitor results and actually measure success, otherwise what’s the point in all of this?

Our response rates are pretty solid;

And nearly 50% of responses come from follow up emails;

But, what ultimately matters is that we get positive responses & earn links;

So that’s much how we go about launching a natural outreach campaign from start to finish.

We’re using a very authentic, highly scalable process to get our content in front of the right people, maintaining a very high response rate and truly engage them.

Strategy 2) Guest Posting

Guest Posting is a tried and tested strategy that’s used by top-level marketers across the World. It allows us to reach a target audience we wouldn’t otherwise be able to, and can earn us some strong referral traffic over time.

Another benefit for link builders is that we can often control the target URL and anchor text for links that we place within guest posts, which is useful for building powerful links to difficult pages.

The process follows a very similar suit to strategy 1. We create a list of target prospects in various niches relevant and related to real estate.

Some key niches we targeted for guest posts:

Once we have a full list of potential targets, it’s once again time to start sending emails!

Note: Again, I can’t show you our exact outreach templates, but I can give you some pointers below.

Guest Post Template Pointers

1. Always use the recipients first name and be personable.
2. Be clear, open & honest as to why you’re emailing.
3. Include your credentials to display trust – a strong email signature always helps.
4. Show some examples of excellent writing work you’ve completed in the past, so they know the level of quality they’re getting right off the bat.
5. Throw out a few unique topical ideas that would be genuinely insightful and interesting. This is where most people fail, because they suggest completely generic, uninteresting topics for contribution.

Results

Below are the results & responses from various guest post campaigns we sent out in the Real Estate & Sales niche.

Outreach to Real Estate Blogs yielded a 45% response rate:

Outreach to Sales Blogs was even higher, at 54%:

Our responses were very positive across the board!

Here’s our response from HubSpot:

And another gratifying response from a highly respected sales coach:

We’ve now successfully used guest posting to drive over 40 high-quality links to the website from extremely relevant pages, on blogs that would otherwise be very difficult to access.

Supercharging Traffic – Keyword Gap Analysis

Of course, as you’ve seen, we’re using outreach & link building to power up the pages & content we already have, but at LinkBuilder.io, we like to take things a step further to ensure our clients see the biggest traffic gains possible.

This is the absolute easiest hack when it comes to generating SEO traffic.

Make a list of websites in your industry

They don’t have to be direct competitors, but in the same general vertical and targeting your keywords. Here’s some examples;

1. Fitsmallbusiness.com – Not a direct competitor, but ranks extremely well for various keywords such as “Real Estate Marketing Ideas” and “Best Real Estate CRM”
2. Easyagentpro.com – They offer out-the-box Real Estate websites that convert
3. BoomtownROI.com – Real Estate marketing tools software
4. Inman.com – Authority news and guides website covering Real Estate
5. Placester.com – They build Real Estate websites

Analyze their organic traffic

One by one, type each website into Ahrefs and click on the ‘Organic Keywords Tab’.

P.S. a tool like Ahrefs is essential for this.

You’ll have instant access to all of their top performing pages and keywords. Voila.

Take a list of the top performing keywords & their corresponding pages – The goal is to literally cherry-pick all of the best ones.

List Your New Content Topics

Make a list of all the articles you’d like to create, and hand over to your content team.

Give them the important details, show them the top ranking competitors so they know how to create something even better.

Success Stories

I’m going to show you a few examples of instances where we’ve created new content based on this strategy and seen incredible results.

The Page Earns Traffic for a ton of long-tail variations:

The website was massively under-performing for ‘CRM’ related searches, which is absolutely crucial to their core business. This single piece of content creation changed that completely. Of course, our link building company powered-up the page to get it performing well.

Final Word

The overarching purpose of this blog post is to show that it’s not impossible to get creative with your link building efforts, even in a highly established industry such as Real Estate, and to branch out beyond traditional industry marketing tactics like real estate brochures and other print media.”

I hope that some of the strategies & guidance here will help you to get more creative, and these are certainly ideas that are transferable to any number of different industries as well.