Last week, I shared five of my favorite backlink tactics for Realtors. I explained in that article that backlinks to your professional website from other, trusted sites will boost your Google rankings and elevate your site’s domain authority and page authority.
And there’s more where that came from! Here are three more backlink tactics that real estate professionals can use to help increase traffic from a Google search result.
1. Be a teacher’s pet
Do you have a mentor, coach, agency, teacher, online guitar lesson instructor, cooking class guru or yoga trainer? If so, they have a website and need exemplary students to show off!
Unlike in high school, you want to be the teacher’s pet. You want your link on the teacher’s home page!
Teachers do not look effective if they don’t have successful students. This means they need your face (and website) on their website to make them look credible. A good way to get your information on their website is simply to email them once a week. Put them into your CRM and force yourself to email them. Here are some ideas for that email:
- Thank you so much! I tried [insert advice here] and it produced [insert result here].
- Hi, I have a quick question. When doing [insert tactic here] I don’t quite get the results you were talking about. What am I doing wrong?
- I read that new article you just published and these questions came to mind. Could you answer them?
The point of these emails is to engage and thank your mentor and to help your mentor understand what is or isn’t working for you. This will help them improve their business and thus make you very valuable to them.
After several weeks of doing this, copy the email from the testimonial method above and send it to your mentor. You will easily get a link from someone with this method if you provide them with enough value to make their product better.
2. Business buddies
Do you have a mastermind group or maybe other business friends that you co-brand? These relationships are great for link exchanges. For example, let’s say you have a decent following on social media and also have a substantial email list. You can offer value to your subscribers by giving them a coupon to a local business. This type of exchange helps the other business owners and gives your audiences something of value. You are essentially giving something to everyone and asking for very little in exchange.
Chances are, the business you’ll provide a coupon for will not have an extensive email list or social network. So you can suggest they provide value to you through a link on their website.
This method works well on three levels. First, you’re providing tremendous special value for people who stay on your social networks and lists. The coupon you are offering them cannot be found anywhere else. Second, you are aiding another local business owner, who will probably talk about your generosity to others and be highly inclined to do business with you. Third, you’re able to get that link back to your own website.
When you try this method, be sure to comment below on the results. I bet you’ll be amazed at the response it gets from everyone.
8. Sponsor schools
Backlinks from a school (a .edu website) are worth their weight in gold. They are favored by Google and typically indicated that a website is of really high quality. The cool part about this is that right now is a great time to get .edu backlinks. Schools are finally giving subblogs or pages to individual clubs, sports and organizations. This means that instead of having to get the one webmaster for the entire school’s website to log in and add a link to your website, you only need to convince the leader of an organization that your website should be linked on the organization site. Here are two ways to do that:
Donate money: The first step here is to find the little guys. Everyone is donating to the top sports teams and other big-name entities. You want to find the people that never get attention and donations.
You’d be surprised what the local high school’s art club will do for a small donation. They will be more than happy to put a link on their portion of the school website to your website. To initiate this method, simply reach out to about 10 small organizations nearby and ask how you can donate. The smaller organizations probably will not have a standardized process for this, so it leaves you plenty of room for negotiation in terms of the actual deal.
Teach or guest-lecture: The second way to get .edu links is to give time to school organizations. Business clubs at local high schools and colleges usually have entrepreneurship days or weeks. A simple email is usually enough to secure a speaking engagement during the week.
Your website is an investment. Just a little bit of time spent on these backlink tactics will make that investment much more lucrative and visible on Google, which should lead to more sales! Let us know what works for you in the comments.
Tyler Zey is an award-winning digital marketing expert who frequently works with small businesses. He also plays clarinet professionally in several orchestras. Currently, he is the digital marketing director and contributing editor for the Real Estate Digital Marketing blog on easyagentpro.com.