Modern Link Building Strategies That Property Managers Can Use to Surge SEO Results
By Landon Murie
November 21st, 2020
Want to grow your property management company?
One of the best ways to boost a business's SEO performance is through link building, and the property management industry is no exception.
If you want your website to rank well for popular keyword search terms and increase traffic to various pages, you can do so with a comprehensive link building campaign.
Why?
When another website links to your website, this is a backlink. Essentially, backlinks are viewed by search engine algorithms as a vote of trust, or vote of confidence.
It improves your trust and authority in the eyes of search engines, and leads to better rankings and exposure.
Having a large network of high-quality links that balance both quality and quantity can be one of many invaluable SEO strategies for your business to get more traffic and property owner leads from local and organic search results.
The following are some of the best white-hat link building strategies for property managers to implement today.
Acquiring Links from Companies You Work with
You can begin by reaching out to companies you currently work with, such as realtors or vendors, and ask them if they would be willing to link to your property management company website by mentioning you as a partner or affiliated company.
You may offer to do the same for them in exchange for the link. Other local real estate companies may also be willing to link back to you upon request, which can be mutually beneficial for both parties.
In these cases, you may not need to do any extra work to submit a guest post or create other pieces of content, but definitely don't rely on this strategy alone.
Guest Posting Opportunities on Industry Blogs and Online Publications
Guest blogging has been around for a long time, but it's become an increasingly relevant content marketing strategy when it comes to building top-quality links for SEO purposes. Guest blogging can also help businesses build a reputation as a knowledgeable industry leader, bringing value to their audiences through creating rich and original content for other websites.
Reaching out to industry blogs that cover many property management or general real estate industry topics can be a great way to get links to your website. However, it's important to avoid making obtaining links your main goal with guest posting.
Instead, look for some reputable blogs in your industry and develop a topic that provides some unique insight or information that their audiences will actually want to read. Investing effort into guest blog posts can help you stand out and land the best placement for your articles. Subsequently, those posts will not only help with link building efforts, but they will also establish your business as a successful and winning thought leader in the property management industry.
Building an Exhaustive Property Management Resource
You can also use your own website as a huge asset for internal link building. You can have a page that's dedicated to highlighting a myriad property management topics, with links to different pages for each topic.
For example, you could have a resource page that serves as a knowledge hub that prospects, leads, and existing clientele can review. Topics listed could include steps for hiring property managers, rental law, HOA management, property investing, maintenance, locating and managing tenants, and many others. From there, you could link to individual blog posts or articles on your website that discuss subtopics branching from these core topics. Each of those pages could contain a link and keyword-rich anchor text that goes to another page you would like to perform better in search engines. You can then share these posts on your social media channels, and they may rank well on their own with proper optimization and high-quality external backlinks connecting to them.
In addition to helping build links internally, having an in-depth resource could further cement your business as a knowledgeable industry authority that people trust.
Creating Highly Shareable PM Industry Content
Another way to build links without the need to launch extensive campaigns or if you are a just starting in property management is to create content that your audiences will want to share. Shareable content could include the aforementioned resource, but it can also include plenty of other content such as blog posts covering topical industry news updates, press releases, and other exciting content that naturally generates more backlinks.
The more valuable and relevant your content is, the more likely your audience is to share it with others.
Check Out What Your Top Competitors Are Doing
It's always a good idea to see what competing property management companies are doing that you could implement in your own campaigns. Perform a backlink analysis to find out where your competitors are getting links and identify the best opportunities based on those placements.
While seeking out sites that are linking to your competitors can help you gain a competitive edge, it's important to go into competitive analysis well-informed. Many of your competitors may have landed some low-quality link opportunities, which you may find in their backlink profiles. Make sure you find the best possible opportunities and weed out the bad ones.
Using the right tools, you can analyze competitors' backlinks and identify which opportunities could be beneficial for your business.
You could even look on Google to see where your competitors' business names or employees appear as authors for content. For example, searching the company name followed by "site:competitor.com" could lead you to a list of results wherein the company appears in author bios. Some of those bios may appear on reputable industry blogs that are worth reaching out to for guest posting opportunities.
Finding the Right Person to Contact for Every Opportunity
It's not enough to find the right blog post or publication. Once you've located these ideal placements for your posts and links, you need to make sure you reach out to the right person.
In many cases, businesses don't succeed in getting links because they don't take the time to determine who they need to contact beforehand. Instead of reaching out to a specific person such as an editor, they may send an email to a generic contact address that people don't regularly check, or which may not even be appropriate for link building opportunities.
Before you send that initial email out to connect with someone, try to figure out precisely who to contact and address that person directly in your email. Knowing who to contact and addressing them in your email correspondence also shows that you care about the people behind the publication, which can go a long way in building a good relationship with those people and lead to future opportunities.
Building Links with Your Images
One oft-overlooked strategy for link building is to use your images. Building links with your images works much the same way link building via brand mentions works. You can start by searching for instances of your images online, which could include company property and logos. If people are using your images without your permission, you could ask them to cite your business by linking back to your website.
In most cases, the best practice is to send a simple and polite message asking people to link to you from the images they've used, without any threats issued for copyright infringement. People using your images are likely to be receptive to your request, which will help build even more high-quality links.
You can locate your images using a reverse image search on Google. Simply upload your photo to Google and the results should match you with other instances of those images and the corresponding webpages. Look for any logos, illustrations, corporate photos, online property listings, branded images, or other images you produced and own.
Wrapping Up
By implementing each of these link building strategies, property managers can significantly boost their rankings and effectively establish themselves as reputable and knowledgeable industry professionals.