The Importance of Backlinking for SEO to Realtors

A strong online presence is necessary in today's digital age, especially for real estate agents. While many options exist for increasing website visibility, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most affordable and effective way to drive traffic to your site. 

Backlinking is a crucial part of SEO involving linking other sites to your website. As a vital factor for determining search engine rankings, it can significantly improve a site's credibility and authority. 

For real estate agents, backlinking for SEO helps increase the property listing's visibility and attract potential clients. However, real estate agents must learn the best link-building practices to avoid search engine penalties. 

This guide explores the fundamentals of SEO backlinking, strategies for building quality backlinks, and the importance of backlinks in SEO. But first, what are real estate backlinks?

What Is a Real Estate Backlink?

Generally, backlinks for SEO are links from one website to another. The more high-quality and relevant backlinks you have on your website, the better your Google search ranking. 

Real estate backlinks are links from other real estate blogs and websites. They're categorized into nofollow and dofollow backlinks according to how Google associates websites linking to your site. 

Nofollow links don't pass on authority to a site, while Dofollow links pass on link juice. 

Importance of Backlinks in SEO

You might be asking, are backlinks important for SEO? The following are reasons backlinks remain essential for real estate SEO success:

• More Visibility

Backlink building improves your visibility, making it easier to discover your website online. Search engines view pages they've already crawled, especially the most popular pages when searching for content to crawl. Thus, backlinking helps search engine algorithms find your content faster. 

Also, backlinking provides you with more site visitors through referral traffic. People who read your content on a popular website might click on your backlinks, helping them find more information about the topic on the relevant pages.

• Higher Ranking

If you've been asking, "Why are backlinks important", backlinks for SEO improve your website ranking on Google and other search engines because they see the quality of the links as authoritative from other websites. 

Simply put, the more SEO backlinks your site has, the higher its Google rankings in search terms. However, you need to consider factors like page speed and on-page SEO as they also influence rankings. 

• Boosts Domain Authority

Another importance of backlinks is that it helps boost your domain authority. Although domain authority isn't one of the factors the search engine algorithm ranks for websites, many SEO tools use it to identify methods to improve your link-building strategy by comparing your site to your competitors.

The higher your domain authority, the better your chances to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Although domain authority isn't a ranking factor, you can use it to measure your improvement to determine if your link-building efforts are improving your rankings.

• Increases Brand Awareness

You might have been wondering how important are backlinks to SEO. Backlinks increase your real estate business's brand awareness online, helping to showcase your services. By getting backlinks from authoritative websites with thousands of monthly visitors, your brand awareness will increase by the higher reach from the other website's visitors.

Factors to Note When Building Backlinks

Now that you've gotten the answer to the question, what is the importance of backlinks to SEO? It's time to consider some vital factors that can help you get as many backlinks as possible, including:

• Anchor Text Ratio

When trying to earn backlinks from other sites, you need to focus on your anchor text ratio. The anchor text is part of the sentence you embed the backlink. 

While building backlinks, you can request or choose a specific anchor text. However, the anchor text must be relevant to the link to avoid spammy backlinks. 

Also, avoid overusing the target keyword (keyword stuffing). You don't want Google to see the links to the same keyword or anchor text as spammy links. Consider using variations of the keyword plus your brand or website name interchangeably.

• Link Relevance

One of the factors to know when trying to gain backlinks is link relevance. Your backlinks and the sites you'll place them on should be related to real estates and similar industries, such as property financing and management. 

However, this rule is flexible. For example, you can link referenced web pages from websites focusing on landscaping or gardening because they're complementary niches to the real estate business.

• Website Preparation

After preparing for link building, it's time to get your website ready for organic traffic. Your website should be where visitors will stick around longer to read quality content. 

Hence, it's best to produce more engaging content and add exciting multimedia for your website visitors to interact with. Remember also to include your best listings for potential buyers.

Also, update and optimize your "About Us" page. According to Hubspot, the "About Us" page ranks amongst the top three most visited real estate website links, alongside the "Contact Us" page and Blog page.

Therefore, design your "About Us" page before winning backlinks to show your brand mission and story while building trust with visitors. Also, ensure your contact form is simple to fill out and intuitive.

You can leave the details for later, for instance, when closing the deals. Simply focus on letting readers leave you a message and collecting emails.

• Landing Page

It's best to send some inbound links to your "About Us'' page more often. Also,  channel links to your best real estate listings. However, instead of sending links to separate listings, create a web page to list your best properties. Ensure to list the homes in order of relevance. 

Also, update the web page frequently to enable visitors to find relevant listings on the pages they land on. Remember to send backlinks to each valuable blog post on your website. That way, you establish your authority on important industry matters.

You'll also need to optimize each blog post with a well-structured Call to Action (CTA) to help you earn leads that'll convert to paying customers.

• Link Diversity and Velocity

If you've been wondering, "How do backlinks help SEO, note that a healthy real estate backlinks portfolio determines your real estate listings and website popularity in the eyes of search engines. 

While backlinking isn't the only ranking factor in search engine optimization, it plays a crucial role in an effective SEO strategy. Getting backlinks from multiple sources, including social media, web pages, directories, and blogs, is best for developing a great portfolio.

Search engines hold websites cited as an authority on many platforms in high esteem. This spread is called link diversity. 

Another metric to consider is link velocity which tracks the speed of incoming links from other websites. For instance, if you suddenly have 3,000 backlinks within a little time, Google and other search engines, like Bing, will suspect you paid for backlinks to manipulate search engines.

Hence, it's best to create quality content, publish link-worthy listings, and collaborate with other websites to earn backlinks naturally.

• Domain and Page Authority

Other factors to consider are page and domain authority. Page authority is a metric used to determine the effectiveness of a specific page's ranking on search engines. 

Alternatively, domain authority is an aggregate of a website's page authority. Simply put, both signify your website and content relevance to your target customers.

Domain and page authority is measured from 0-100. The higher your site ranking, the better. While growing your page and domain authority, it's best to get backlinks from web pages with high scores in these metrics.

• Trust Flow and Citation Flow

When trying to understand the importance of backlinking for SEO, you'll have to learn about trust flow and citation flow. Citation flow is measured from 0-100 and notifies the search engines about the number of sites linking to your content. 

A higher citation flow score means a better organic ranking for your business. Trust flow is a number that determines the extent of search engines' trust in your website. You can determine the trust flow by the popularity and quality of websites linking to your site.

How to Get More Backlinks

After answering the question, how do backlinks help SEO and exploring factors to consider before backlinking, we've put together these effective strategies to help you build backlinks.

1. Consistent Content Creation

Creating consistent quality content is the first step towards building your SEO rankings. Without creating blog content regularly for your website, you might not rank for longtail keyword phrases like "how to sell my home in Massachusetts" or "the benefits of working with a Taunton realtor."

More content ensures more website visitors and a higher ranking on search engines like Google. Remember to create content for every keyword phrase you're targetting.

2. Study Competitor Link Sources

One way to build more links is to study your competitors' link sources. The real estate industry is filled with many big players. Instead of competing with these big brands on general topics, focus on increasing local relevance. 

Become the master of your niche, and it'll be more valuable and easier to rank for keywords with local city or town names. However, if many local real estate agencies with strong online presence are in your location, it's time to outsource your marketing to a leading digital marketing company like Ardor SEO to compete effectively. 

3. Review Agencies and Property Listings

Another way to get quality external links is to review real estate agencies and property listings. However, ensure your reviews are unbiased and factual. An honest assessment of these sites will increase your authority amongst your competitors.

Also, it can earn you backlinks as the site owners share your review content on their website.

4. Get on Real Estate Directories

While real estate directories are a type of resource page, they focus on showing relevant websites according to their specialty. Due to their relevance in search results, they have considerable domain authority. 

You can get an excellent outbound link when your business is featured in real estate directories. However, some directories are paid for, while others are free.

5. Guest Blogging for Similar Websites

Guest blogging on related real estate websites or your specific niche is an effective way to build backlinks and send referral traffic to your site. Most marketing experts regard guest blogging as one of the backlinking for SEO best practices. 

6. Get Involved in Your Community

Local community activity participation is one great way to build relationships with similar website owners, organizations, and businesses in your area while earning high-quality backlinks for your site.

The idea is to do something newsworthy and participate actively in events, so you'll be linked to reports about it.

FAQs

Conclusion

If you've been wondering, "Why are backlinks important in SEO", you already know the answer. Backlinking is a crucial SEO element that can impact a website's online authority, credibility, and visibility. 

As a real estate site owner, you must employ effective strategies for building quality backlinks to attract potential clients, maintain a strong online presence, and increase your property listings' visibility. 

However, remember to get links from only authoritative websites. With the right strategies, backlinking can help real estate agents drive business growth and boost their online presence.