Real Estate Link Building: How to Build Backlinks in a Tricky Niche 

The consensus among a lot of link builders and real estate businesses that know their SEO is that it can be quite difficult to make link building work in the real estate industry. 

We at dofollow respectfully disagree.

We’ve been building links for our real estate clients for a while, and we managed to build fantastic backlinks on high domain authority, SEO-boosting websites all the time. 

We are not disputing, however, that success in the real estate niche does require some creativity and a well-thought-out approach. 

This holds true whether you’re doing it yourself or outsourcing your link building. 

In the below sections, we will detail what is required to make real estate link building work. This is a tough niche, but with great opportunities for those who know what they’re doing. 

Content selection is key

If you want to make link building work in the real estate space, you need to spend some time going through your content and shortlisting your best, most original stuff. 

You want things that you can easily sell to your link target sites–things that will add real value for them, on topics that they haven’t already covered. 

What this means is that your approach to prospecting if you’re in the real estate business is extra important. 

How to do competitor prospecting the right way

There are a few different ways you can prospect: 

• Standard competitor research that looks for opportunities to pitch websites that have already linked to similar content
• Using advanced search operators in Google to find relevant sites that cover your subject area
• Using SEO analytics tools like Ahrefs to look for content that contains keywords you’re targeting 

What to avoid while prospecting

One of the biggest downfalls while doing competitor prospecting (in any niche) is coming up with a list of websites that cover the exact same topics as you. 

Very often, these are articles written by key competitors, and it’s a huge mistake to go down this path. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the target website you are pitching. Why would someone writing about digital marketing skills for real estate agents link to another almost identical article about digital marketing skills for real estate agents?

The idea is to find similar but not identical content. 

Of course, this takes time, but it’s time well spent and, in the real estate niche, it’s necessary time. 

At the end of your prospecting, you should have around 100 potential referring domains. 

After you’ve got your list, you have to set up your outreach campaign. 

There are a bunch of different tools out there–Hunter, Snov, Mailchimp, etc. 

Basically, what you’re doing here is uploading all of the relevant information for each referring domain–the domain itself and the contact information of the person you need to reach out to–and then creating templates and automating your outreach schedule. 

How to structure your outreach email templates

If you want high quality backlinks, you need to create high-quality email templates, it’s that simple. 

Instead of showing you one of the templates that we use (which is anti-originality) we’d rather give you some general guidelines and best practices and have you build off them. 

Trust us, you will have a better response rate for it. 

• Address the recipient by their first name when possible

• Make your intro to the point and friendly–no need to be overly formal or try to explain everything you’re doing in fine detail. 

• Make your outreach emails short. A few paragraphs are enough 

• Acknowledge the host site and their work (don’t just drone on about yourself and what YOU are trying to do. 

• Tell them how your link will add value for their readers and, when possible, try to explain it’s SEO angle for them as well. 

• Ask them if there is anything you can do for them in return (using your social profiles to shout them out etc.)

• Always send a follow-up email. A lot of your success rate will come from the follow up. 

Monitor your results and success

Once you’ve completed an outreach campaign, you need to know whether what you’ve done has worked or not. 

A good response rate matters, of course, but what you are ultimately after is a yes to your link request. 

This is how you do a natural outreach campaign. 

It’s pretty straightforward, and the key is to find content that a) hasn’t already been done to death and b) that isn’t a carbon copy of what your competitors have already done. 

Guest posting the right way

Another important consideration when building links in the real estate industry is that guest posting can be a bit tricky. 

Guest posting is one of the most commonly used and high-ROI link building methods. In virtually any niche you care to think of, the guest blog post is a tried and true link building strategy. 

It also gives you important editorial control. 

When you write a guest post, you get to control what the anchor text looks like, where it goes and what page you are linking to on your own website–providing link juice and driving traffic. 

E-A-T caveat 1 when it comes to real estate guest posting

One very important thing to keep in mind when executing a guest posting campaign in the real estate industry is that, while real estate as a broad topic is not a your money, your life area, you can veer into YMYL when you start dealing with housing information. 

A guest post about what to look for in an investment property is a lot different than one about the must-have features of real estate websites. 

It’s important to understand this because you are going to be pitching websites on your content ideas when you do your outreach, and most site owners and webmasters are going to be a lot warier of YMYL content because Google is a lot more strict when it comes to E-A-T (Expertise, Authority and Trust). 

If you are publishing content making health or money-related recommendations, Google wants to make sure you have the expertise, authority and trust to do so. If you don’t, Google is likely going to suppress the content. 

E-A-T caveat 2 when it comes to link building in the real estate industry

This holds true for any guest post link building campaign, but make sure you are only looking for guest posting opportunities on legitimate websites. 

There are a lot of websites out there that exist only to sell guest posts. Often times these sites will have blog sections full of guest posts to all of the sketchiest industries–cannabis, personal finance, casinos, pornography, etc. 

This is a major red flag that a website doesn’t care about its expertise, authority and trust. You are likely to get, at best, no SEO value from a guest post on such a site, and Google might even decide to penalize your website if you have enough incoming links from such places. 

Branching out

It’s extremely important when building real estate backlinks to branch out into relevant surrounding and adjacent niches. 

Below are some of the most effective for real estate guest posting campaigns. 

Real estate

Of course, guest posts on pure real estate websites are going to be the most relevant to a real estate business. 

The good thing is that real estate sites are usually pretty content-hungry. They are constantly looking for new content ideas. 

Sales

Real estate and sales go hand in hand, whether it’s sales skills or sales tech. 

We’ve built some great links for our real estate clients on sales blogs. 

Marketing

Real estate marketing (and just marketing more generally) are obvious go-tos when it comes to real estate link building. Whether we’re talking about an individual real estate agent, a property management company or a search aggregator, real estate involves marketing at almost every conceivable level. 

Business

Business websites (whether it’s a particular business niche or business more broadly) are all about publishing content on growth, efficiency, productivity and scaling and real estate is often a great context in which to tell those stories

Guest post outreach tips

Your guest post outreach, whether you’re doing it manually or automating it to a hundred or more prospects, needs to incorporate the same outreach principles we outlined above. 

Again, these are: 

• Address your recipients by first name (the golden rule of personalization) 
• Don’t beat around the bush (be transparent about why you’re reaching out)
• Add your credentials in to display trust
• Provide links to examples of your writing, so they know you are capable of producing good-quality writing 
• Provide topic ideas that a) are not ones they have already covered and b) that explain how they jive with the rest of the site or blog content 

HARO for the real estate niche

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out. 

It’s a free digital PR service put out by Cision Presswire, and we’ve covered the mechanics and best practices of HARO at length in this article here. 

It’s worth a read and helps contextualize this next section. 

If you don’t want to read it or don’t have the time, in a nutshell, HARO works by linking writers and sources. 

Sources provide insight and answers to questions and journalists use that information to help augment and buttress their stories. 

There’s never a guarantee that your contribution will be used, but when it is, you can land yourself links in some truly impressive SEO-boosting publications. 

Here are some of the links we’ve built for our clients using HARO

There are a few key things to keep in mind when using HARO to build links for a real estate website. 

HARO and the real estate websites

With HARO, it is possible to build amazing real estate backlinks, but there are some qualifiers. 

The first is that HARO builds (pretty much exclusively) inbound links to your home page. 

These are great, natural links that Google loves, but don’t expect links to your commercial pages or deep pages in your website’s real estate blog from HARO. 

The second is that a lot of times, your efforts are wasted. You are never guaranteed anything when you respond to a journalist’s query for information. 

They might like what you have to say, they might not. They might not even get around to opening your email. 

Or, the site for which the journalist or blogger is writing might have an editorial policy that stipulates no dofollow backlinks.

What you may get instead is a nofollow link (still good for referral traffic and part of a natural backlink profile that search engines like) or a branded mention (your business name mentioned). 

The third is that your credentials matter in the real estate niche. They matter in most niches, journalists are going to want proof that you have authority and credibility to speak on the topic in question. 

Real estate licenses (commercial or residential), a professional looking website, and a well-made Linkedin are all necessary for digital PR success as a real estate professional. 

Quality sites that provide quality backlinks are going to be hesitant to link to you if they’re unsure about your credibility. 

HARO wins as a feather in your cap

When you successfully pitch journalists and bloggers from reputable, high-status websites, what you get is a list of “accomplishments” essentially. 

Below is an example of a HARO query that is just begging for a real estate professional to knock it out of the park: 

It’s asking for insight into how to increase home value (upgrades and renos). Who better to answer this question than a real estate agent? 

The website this will be published on is not listed (as sometimes happens with HARO), but it could be something big (Home and Garden, Western Living, or maybe a huge newspaper). 

These are things you can brag about on your website with an “as featured in” section:

This is a great thing to include on your site for both visitors who may potentially do business with you and websites you are trying to build links to. 

If you’re a real estate agent and have been featured in some renowned publications, it means your opinions and insight have been considered valuable enough by these institutions to include in their articles (typically as an expert on whatever the topic matter is). 

Would you rather buy a home or take real estate advice from an expert or an unknown quantity? 

Secondly, when you are doing things like reaching out to look for guest posting opportunities, very often whether or not you are given the time of day depends on, among other things, your name. 

If you are someone with some weight to their name/brand, others are, of course, going to be more open to working with you. 

They might even be willing to waive the very common guest post placement fees that you have to deal with as a link builder. 

Link building in the real estate business

At the end of the day, attracting high-quality backlinks to your real estate website comes down to a lot of factors. 

Having the relevant resource pages to link to, knowing how to use Google search and SEO analytics tools to find viable opportunities and safe, relevant websites, and creating valuable content are what will get you both more leads and more links. 

It can no doubt be a tricky industry to excel in, but if you know where to look, how to pitch your great ideas and are willing to build relationships and invest in content creation, you can absolutely dominate the search engine results as a real estate business. 

If you are interested in working with a link building service with a proven track record in the real estate niche, get in touch with dofollow today and let’s discuss how our contract-free, user-centric link building can help skyrocket your ranking, organic traffic and conversions.