Real Estate Backlinks: The Definitive Guide

What Are Real Estate Backlinks?

Real estate backlinks are backlinks pointing to real estate websites from other sites, such as publications (like Forbes), business directories, or blogs. 

Building them is notoriously difficult, but necessary if you want to attract more traffic and make your site more visible in search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. 

Backlinks help increase your site and/or page authority and lead to higher rankings. In fact, MonsterInsights dubbed backlinks the second most critical ranking factor after content quality.

Why It’s Difficult to Build Real Estate Backlinks

There are 4 main reasons why it’s difficult to build real estate backlinks: 

1. Real estate content can be considered YMYL content; 
2. The real estate market is becoming more and more competitive, with a growing number of realtors fighting for attention from a decreasing pool of clients; 
3. Real estate websites typically publish commercial content exclusively, 
4. Real estate websites are often too niche. 

Let’s break down why these factors make real estate link building more difficult.

Real Estate Content Can Be YMYL Content 

YMYL content (Your Money or Your Life) is content that Google holds to higher standards since it can impact users’ well-being. This type of content usually revolves around users’ health, finances, and similar themes. 

Topics covered on real estate blogs can often fall into this category. As an example, consider topics such as the benefits of selling your home or renting vs buying.

So, what’s the issue — how does this impact building backlinks? 

Well, here are a few things to note: 

• If you want to build links organically, your content needs to be visible in the search engines. Ranking high with YMYL content, however, can be difficult, especially for smaller sites.
• If you want to build links via outreach, you’ll need to provide exceptionally accurate, authoritative, and well-written content. Even other sites will likely hold your content to higher standards (just like Google).

So, that’s the first reason why building real estate backlinks can be difficult. Let’s look at other ones.

The Market Is Competitive 

The real estate market is becoming increasingly competitive: 

• There are over 360,000 real estate brokerage firms in the US. (National Association of Realtors)
• At the end of June 2023, there were 2 ½ realtors for every home on the market. (Entrepreneur)
• Home prices have been skyrocketing. July 2024, for example, marked the 13th consecutive month of year-over-year jumps in prices. (Bankrate)
• In many places, there are still more realtors than homes being sold, but many remaining realtors are struggling due to buyers pausing their plans on homeownership. (Newsweek)

With all of this in mind, it’s clear that many of your colleagues are fighting to get in front of potential buyers (and sellers) first. 

In some cases, this implies they’re heavily investing in digital PR and backlinks — which means it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up, especially if you rely solely on attracting PR and backlinks organically.

Lack of Noncommercial Content

Another problem is that many real estate websites only publish commercial content, such as property listings. Most sites don’t want to link to such content, as it typically has little to no value for the readers. 

This is especially true when there’s no other incentive for linking to you, i.e., when you’re not paying for backlinks.

Real Estate Websites Are Niche 

Finally, most real estate websites are very niche. They focus on local-specific content, especially property listings. 

This limits their link building opportunities, as their content isn’t widely appealing or relevant. 

How To Build Real Estate Backlinks

There are three main ways to build real estate backlinks: 

• Earn real estate backlinks organically 
• Using proactive strategies to build backlinks
• Buy backlinks

We’ll discuss each of these methods in more depth and show you which tactics you can use to leverage them below.

Keep in mind that your top priority should be building backlinks relevant to your niche, like those coming from interior design, home buying, and investment websites.

1. Earning Organic Real Estate Backlinks

Earning organic real estate backlinks comes down to creating link-worthy content that other people voluntarily link to. 

This method has two big downsides: 

• It yields unpredictable results. You can’t know if your efforts will pay off, i.e., whether people will actually link to you. 
• It’s slow. It typically requires other people to find your content and publish new content that links to you. The process is usually very slow.

Still, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t aim to build links organically. Let’s see how you can increase your chances of doing so:

1.1. Create Linkable Assets

Firstly, make sure you publish assets other people 1) can find and 2) want to link to. This means you’ll want to: 

• Do keyword research and optimize your content for your target real estate keywords,
• Publish high-quality content other people find useful and/or entertaining. 

Here are some content ideas that tend to attract backlinks: 

• Original research — self-conducted studies, surveys, etc., such as “234 Must-Know Real Estate Statistics in 2024”
• Free tools — such as calculators or quizzes, e.g., a calculator of long-term costs of buying vs renting a home
• Content, expert, and similar roundups — e.g., “# Best Places to Buy a Home in 2024”
• Expert interviews
• Newsjacking pieces on trending topics

Consider publishing at least one linkable asset per month. If you want to make it easier for other people to find it, check out the next two steps.

1.1.1. Create Geo-Targeted Content

Before we get to that, though, let’s discuss organically attracting local backlinks for real estate websites.

Local backlinks are links from local websites to yours. This can include sites from local bloggers, businesses, publications, etc.  

Local backlinks are important for real estate websites since they’re usually very locally oriented. For example, if you serve the NYC area, getting a backlink from the New York Daily News could be highly beneficial, both SEO- and conversion-wise. 

However, you probably won’t be able to attract such backlinks without geo-targeted content. With that in mind, you could consider publishing: 

• Localized news pieces and commentary
• Geo-targeted guides, like “The Definitive Guide to Buying a Property in [city]”
• Localized announcements, such as event announcements 
• Localized findings, such as “What # Residents Say about Living in [city]”

1.2. Promote Your Content On Social Media

Promoting your content on social media is a great way to give it more visibility and, potentially, get it in front of people who will link to it from their content. 

Consider: 

• Promoting new content on your profile (for example, through standalone posts or by featuring it on your profile) 
• Promoting it in social media groups
• Sharing it directly with people via DMs 

Note that employing these strategies doesn’t necessarily count as “organically earning links,” since you’re actively working on building them. It also means that you’ll need to invest significantly more time into the process.

1.3. Promote Your Content Via Blogger Outreach

Blogger outreach also doesn’t necessarily count as naturally attracting backlinks. It involves: 

• Identifying the bloggers you want to contact (prospect sourcing)
• Finding their contact information
• Creating and sending a pitch with the link to your content

So, again, you are actively putting in the effort into building links. This can be a slow, time-consuming, and laborious process — which may be why you want to look into other options. 

2. Proactive Real Estate Link Building Strategies

As mentioned, earning real estate backlinks organically is slow and unpredictable. That’s why you may want to employ more proactive link building strategies that will help you speed up the process.

Note that promoting your content via blogger outreach and social media can also be considered a proactive approach. 

However, these strategies have been largely overused by SEOs and site owners. Today, they are pretty much expected and yield poor results. That’s why we suggest combining them with the following proactive strategies:

2.1. Host Local Events

Hosting local events is a great strategy for building local backlinks for real estate websites.

You can consider hosting fundraisers, conferences, networking events, and similar events. 

Publish information about it on your website, then ask local publications to help you promote your event. Make sure to ask them to include a link to your website — for example, for reservation purposes.

2.2. Submit Press Releases

Another strategy to consider is submitting press releases to local or national publications (depending on the nature of your press release). 

Use this strategy sparingly, as you only want to contact publications if you have truly newsworthy information to share.

For example, this can include: 

• Announcing new partnerships, mergers, and acquisitions
• Sharing information about the awards and recognitions you’ve received
• Charity press releases
• Announcing new hires or market expansion, etc.

Once you create your press release, pitch it to your chosen publications. 

2.3. Submit Your Information To Business Directories

The easiest way to build backlinks is usually submitting your information to business directories. Here are some you may be able to leverage:

• National Association of Realtors (NAR) directory
• Realtor.com directory
• Zillow’s real estate agent directory
• Redfin directory
• Pr.com directory

Some of these directories will publish your information (and link to your site) for free, while others may charge you for it.

Keep in mind that, while easily obtainable, these backlinks are lower quality than contextual backlinks. They won’t bring you as many benefits as more relevant, natural, and in-content backlinks in high-authority publications.

So, if the price per listing is high, consider buying backlinks from other places. We’ll talk more about this below.

2.4. Leverage Local Relationships

Finally, see if you can leverage existing relationships with other local business owners, publications, or site owners. 

For example, you may want to:

• exchange links with another business
• arrange a cross-promotion 
• embark on a joint venture 
• host a joint event

These strategies can help you not only build backlinks, but also expose your business to new audiences free of charge.

2.5. Other Proactive Real Estate Link Building Strategies

Other strategies you may want to use to build links to your real estate website include: 

• Broken link building — Finding broken links on other websites and reaching out to site owners in order to replace them with your own
• Niche edits — Working to insert links to your content from existing pages on other websites 
• Guest posting — Creating content with your links and publishing it on other websites
• Forum link building —- Answering questions on forums, like Quora or Reddit, and adding links to your site to your posts
• Scholarship link building — Submitting scholarships to universities in order to get highly-coveted .edu backlinks
• Turning non-linked brand mentions into links — Finding sites that mention your brand but don’t link to you, and asking site owners to add your links
• Building Wikipedia backlinks — Inserting links to your (non-commercial!) content from existing Wikipedia pages 

You can find more information about each of these strategies by clicking the links ^.

3. The Ultimate Cure: Buying Backlinks

While all of the above strategies can help you build real estate backlinks, they have several notable disadvantages. They are typically time-consuming and laborious, unpredictable, and slow in yielding real results. 

That’s why most business owners ultimately decide to buy backlinks.

Buying backlinks is more predictable, easier, and faster. It can also be cheaper than attempting to build backlinks yourself. 

For example, consider the overall costs and time investments of creating high-quality, linkable content and promoting it. Given the number of hours this may take, buying backlinks may actually turn out to be a cheaper option.

You can buy backlinks on link building marketplaces, but we suggest working with a reputable link building agency to ensure you’re getting relevant links that won’t get taken down. 

You can order your backlinks from us if you’re interested in paid link building.

How To Monitor Results After You Build Real Estate Backlinks

Quality real estate backlinks should help you see the following results: 

• Higher rankings in search engines 
• More organic traffic on your site
• More referral traffic coming from websites that host your links

You can monitor these results via native tools, like Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA4), which show you the metrics pertaining to a specific search engine. For example, GSC will show you your rankings in Google, but not in Bing. 

Additionally, you can also use third-party tools, like Ahrefs and Semrush, to monitor your overall results across search engines and for all types of traffic. These are paid tools that typically have less accurate results than native tools, but they’re almost necessary for SEO.

Native tools: 

• Google Search Console, GA4, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc. 
• Free to use 
• Most accurate
• Limited data

Third-party tools: 

• Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, etc. 
• Paid 
• Less accurate 
• More comprehensive data

Whichever option you choose — or, preferably both — make sure to regularly check in and track your results. You may want to keep a spreadsheet with your most important monthly metrics. 

Pay the most attention to how backlinks affect the performance of the exact pages they’re linking to.

Finally, keep in mind that backlinks can, in some cases, take months before yielding results. You can speed up the process by building high-quality backlinks.

FAQs

Does SEO work for real estate?

Yes, SEO works for real estate. However, considering that real estate is a highly competitive niche, realtors may need to invest more wisely into it than other professionals in order to see results.

Order High-Quality Real Estate Backlinks Today

Are you interested in working with a reputable link building agency to get premium real estate backlinks? Then contact our experts today. We’ll help you choose the right sites for your links, create high-quality content for you, and ensure your links stay live. 

Contact us today to get started.