If you could invest $5,000 in backlinks to secure increased rankings for your real estate website, what would you do?
Would you risk, buying as many links as possible from as many sources as you can find, in an attempt to quickly rank in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines?
Or, would you rather, partner with a link building team, and work out a scalable strategy to attract trust-worthy, ‘white-hat’ links, reaping the benefits for months and years to come?
What is link building you may ask?
The story of link building traces back to Adam and Eve.
There are some subtle connotations you ought to know about, which we’ll reveal in a minute.
But first, let me tell you what link building is not.
Link building is not a magic wand that instantly transforms you into a traffic-generating ninja.
It is not the holy grail to mediocre content.
It is not a push-button tool that sends hundreds of visitors to your website overnight.
It is not a content marketing hack.
It is not a cold email outreach template that you blast to 100’s of random leads, then sit back and wait for them to do business with you.
It is not a quick SEO ranking formula.
Just ask around. More often than not, you’ll hear that most real estate marketers and agencies erroneously believe these to be proven methods. Usually, they realize the contrary to be true, only after squandering $5,000.
When it comes to link building for Google rankings, no budget in the world will solve your lack of organic traffic, clients, and referrals. Building an effective link building strategy will pay dividends for your business in the long run.
So what’s the alternative you ask?
You need an expert SEO team by your side, to help:
- Run a professional audit of your website, and then
- Create a custom link building strategy for your real estate website.
The question is: will you be able to trust an SEO agency with your $5,000 budget?
Should you pay a general SEO firm to handle your link building campaign, or should you employ a team who is highly specialized and experienced in real estate website ranking and link building?
Unfortunately, Adam and Eve learned the hard way whom to TRUST.
The ancient story of managing the Garden of Heaven, teaches us some vital modern SEO lessons that we can apply to our websites and businesses.
This power couple lost everything they had, in a split second, such as:
A one-on-one, direct relationship with the almighty God.
And access to everything the Heavenly realm offered them, free of charge.
The Bible reveals that our spiritual mother and father conducted what the SEO experts refer to as ‘black hat’ experiments.
As you recall, the enemy, also known as Satan, used ‘link-bait’ to engage Eve in a high stakes conversation, which ultimately changed the direction of human destiny.
I’ll explain this statement in a second.
For now, understand this:
For most website owners and marketing newbies, the first SEO encounter starts off with a bad experience.
They get lured into believing the various ‘link building’ scams out there, and mistakenly place their trust in the empty lies promising ‘get fast rankings’ touted by the so-called ‘SEO experts’.
Stop! You don’t have to tolerate their drivel anymore.
Once you know the truth, the truth will set you free!
What I mean is simple: test-drive the reputation of an expert, before paying for their service. Here’s what you need to do:
Engage those SEO teams with an extensive proven track record in helping businesses like yours generate consistent traffic and rankings via ethical link building.
Ask them to perform an SEO audit for your real estate website, and share the findings with you.
If you like what you see, and your gut instinct tells you that this team is the perfect fit, then ask about pricing. Try to negotiate a smaller contract in the beginning.
Maybe $1,000 or $1,500 would be enough to ensure you get a feel for their service, and see results before fully embracing their proposed strategy.
I call this the ACM Method, also known as Authentic Conversational Marketing, a trust-building approach that does not pressure you into buying anything when you search for an SEO partner for your real estate business.
Some important points to consider:
Genuine link building starts with a ‘white-hat’ link building pro performing competitive SEO intelligence, and keyword research.
Most teams are aware of this, but do not apply it correctly. Therefore, you should always double check their actual website rankings and client testimonials.
Back in Heaven, everything was strategically mapped out in advance, and “link-bait” was fundamental.
The fallen angel, Satan, didn’t approach our ancestors directly. He used a serpent as his furtive ally to execute his cunning plan.
The goal was to captivate Eve’s attention, while she was away from Adam bewitching her and engaging her imagination (the right brain), inspiring her curiosity about the forbidden fruit.
It all started with an ‘innocent’ question:
‘God said, you shall not eat from every tree of the garden?’
A strange, insidious counter idea was rapidly planted in her mind… with a single goal:
To question God’s authority, and to ignore the only demand he made of man.
‘And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die.’
Eve’s faith in God was battled-tested, for the first time. At least, that’s what the narrative tells us.
Eve’s guard is down when confronted with this surreptitious proposal, therefore, she is swiftly mired in the swamp of lies.
‘And the serpent said unto the woman, you shall not surely die. For God knows that the day you eat, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’
Again, Satan starts to construct his arguments on the earlier, completely false premise.
This reminds me of when these ‘SEO experts’ claim top rankings for lower than industry standard fees. Consequently, many succumb to the offer, since it seems like such an irresistible bargain.
Today, Satan still claims that God is unfair, and wants to prevent humans from accessing “God-like” status and achievement.
Some SEO ‘experts’ construct a similar lie when leading you to believe that you can get a certain amount of links in a specific amount of days for a minimal investment.
Long story short, Eve got sidetracked, and was influenced to trust in the ‘father of all lies’ instead of the Creator himself. She was systematically indoctrinated… to look at the fruit in a “new,” distorted way, ultimately touching and consuming it.
‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit, and did eat, and gave it to her husband with her; and he did eat.’
Both fell into the trap, designating the entire human race to either eternal life or eternal damnation. Oops.
How is this universal mega event applicable in today’s SEO and link building shaddy industry?
First, you have to understand this:
SEO and link building is a skill that can be learned. Just like communication.
Once you master it, you can mesmerize your audience and lure them to your real estate website, turning them into raving clients and referrals, just like Netflix is doing with their consumers and their internal content.
Your content has one goal: to produce loyal clients and referrals. Otherwise, your precious time, money and energy spent on content marketing are all in vain.
I’d say link building it’s more of a soft skill than a hard skill since it requires more creativity and imagination than technical SEO know-how per se.
In my experience, there are two types of real estate companies. One company, let’s call it A, creates its own exceptional content and then waits for links to come in. The second company, let’s call it B, publishes fabulous content, provided by or featuring third party sources, and is proactive in link building.
Company A makes two major mistakes:
#1 – Creating Its Own Content
This method presents significant drawbacks. First, you have to invest a considerable amount of time on these 5 common, yet time-consuming, and energy-draining tasks:
- Research
- Writing
- Editing
- Rewriting
- Proofreading
It can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 10 hours to produce a single article or blog post, depending on the content length and research.
Plus, let’s consider the time required for proper graphics creation and content uploading. This may take up to 60 minutes per post.
You may need multiple posts per week to generate enough demand. It is imperative that this content is highly-engaging to transform prospects into clients, right?
If you’ve systematized your business in such a way as to involve your team or allow VAs to handle content research, creation, and publishing, then it’s a significant improvement to your approach.
You’re left with more time to handle other priorities and challenges within your company, while an SEO expert team takes care of ‘content marketing’ via the Authentic Conversational Marketing approach I have mentioned earlier.
Still, other real estate companies take advantage of a different approach, which is more sustainable and profitable, and important for you to use in your business as well.
#2 – Build it, and they’ll come
Sitting back and waiting to receive back-links and brand mentions from industry leaders, as well as targeted bloggers and social media pros who have access to your desired audience, is not going to drive much traffic or attention to your real estate website and content.
It is essential for you to be proactive and highly-strategic in your approach, or not much will happen.
Company B does two things right:
#1 – It publishes content created in-house, in combination with expert interviews, and crowdsourced articles (by non-competitive, third party, ‘authority’ sources)
Example:
25 Real Estate Agents Share Their Best Tips & Advice For First-Time Home Buyers
The result…?
Here’s the number of shares and backlinks (captured via Ahrefs)
Here’s another one
44 Realtors Tips On Selling And Buying A Home At The Same Time
This strategy, if performed right, creates a ‘wildfire’ brand exposure effect for your content, substantially increasing the number of likes, shares, comments, and more importantly, back-links to this type of content.
In time, this combined effort produces consistent organic visitors, and higher web page rankings.
Who said link building for free targeted traffic was a zero cost technique and a working scheme to produce fast results?
However, what I’ve shared above is only the tip of the iceberg.
Let me explain what I mean.
For example, you shouldn’t publish expert roundups just to get backlinks. Think beyond this selfish vision.
You’re creating this popular form of content primarily with your audience in mind, and secondly, to help build trust with the experts, for future beneficial relationships, and mutual growth.
You’ll be rewarded with rankings and visitors as an afterthought. Does this make sense?
I’d say, publishing expert content gives you more time and freedom to focus on your business instead of spending countless frustrating hours trying to figure out how to make your content go ‘viral.’
#2 – It promotes the content on a vast scale
Crowd sourced blog posts created by real estate bloggers and agencies make one major mistake. They think that once their expert roundup goes live, traffic will melt their website servers.
In most cases, the majority of these link building campaigns fall short, and is prevented from taking off due to two main reasons:
- The initial intention of the website owner or SEO team was to get traffic, shares and links, instead of considering their audience and producing insightful content set to spread rapidly due to its fascinating nature.
That’s why some deceitful experts are featured in ‘experts roundups.’ Their responses are mainly based on theory and guessing rather than on hands-on experience.
This is also the reason why poorly conceived questions are asked ad nauseum.
Finally, this is why these blog posts aren’t usually optimized for SEO and ranking purposes.
- There’s no active outreach involved once a post goes live.
In this case, some outreach is done, but it is executed incorrectly. This means that the focus is on obtaining a share or backlink request, instead of providing value for the experts involved.
One expert roundup created with 50 business coaches received a 35% backlink placement response, which is unheard of in the industry.
They’ve managed to provide enough value during the entire process, so that a significant number of experts have linked to the final blog post from their websites.
Authentic Conversational Marketing Strategy, that is covered here, is something you may want to implement in your link building campaign. If you do it right, it works without fail!
If you’re interested in finding out more about a custom SEO link building strategy for quality link building results, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with FlyingVGroup, and request a free website SEO audit.
You may see surprising results within 12 months when your traffic and rankings are propelled through the roof!
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