Building backlinks for businesses in the real estate industry has some significant advantages compared to other niches.

Over the 15 years that I’ve been doing SEO, I have found that with the right approach, it can be a lot easier to do search engine optimization for real estate websites than other niches. 

However, it does all come down to having the right process, and in this blog post, I want to show you how I make sure I find the best possible guest posting opportunities that deliver the biggest bang for your buck. 

Let’s first start with a bit of background. 

What Is Unique About Real Estate Guest Posts?

Whether you own a real estate business or have a client in this industry, there are three things to keep in mind before diving into your guest post strategy. 

1. Great Cross Industry Opportunities

In most other industries, it can be more difficult to find niche-relevant guest posting opportunities. If you’re looking for backlinks for a dentist, then getting links from a fitness instructor might not be the most beneficial approach. 

Technically, both are health-related, but you get into some niche bridging content that doesn’t always work out that well. 

However, real estate agents and businesses directly work with a lot of different industries. 

It makes perfect sense for real estate sites to get links from local construction companies, plumbers, electricians, painters, management companies, etc. 

That makes it a hell of a lot easier to find relevant websites. 

2. High Gatekeeping Standards

In the real estate industry, reputation and accountability tend to be very high priorities. The result is that many real estate sites will be very careful about accepting guest posts to sites they don’t know or trust. 

Unless it’s an established site you’re working on, it’s quite possible that a lot of owners will simply not entertain the opportunity. 

And there’s more. 

3. High Content And Editorial Standards

To be successful with guest blogging, in general, involves creating high-quality content. In the real estate niche, those standards are often a lot higher. 

The reason is that people only want to add content that their own target audience will be interested in reading. 

That doesn’t just mean creating relevant articles but also making sure the content is well-researched and engaging. 

I’ll get to more quality standards shortly. 

Let’s look at the benefits of guest posting before that. 

How Do Quality Real Estate Guest Posts Impact Your Site?

Through endless targeted testing and my experience working with thousands of clients to get them high-quality guest posts, I can tell you for a fact that this SEO strategy will have four distinct benefits: 

• SEO Rankings Improve
• Increased Direct Referral Traffic
• Gain Topical And Brand Authority
• Opportunities For Networking 

Let me give you some more details. 

1. SEO Rankings Improve

Here’s a fact about backlinks: they remain one of the most important ranking factors, with no credible evidence supporting this has changed. 

If you look at expert opinion about the list of Google ranking factors, you’ll immediately see that backlinks are right up there, along with quality content. 

However, over the years, there have been many Google algorithm updates that have directly targeted backlink profiles. 

Typically, these updates have looked at backlink quality, with dodgy and spammy backlinks resulting in ranking demotions and even penalties. 

That’s why quality is absolutely essential for your guest posting strategy. 

More on this shortly. 

2. Increased Direct Referral Traffic

This is one benefit many people don’t value enough in their real estate guest posting approach. 

See, when you get guest posts on other real estate sites, people outside of your regular audience will read that content. 

And if that guest post content is of high quality and engages with the readers, then they will often click on the backlink, increasing your referral traffic. 

It’s a great way to reach a new and expanded target audience that could become regular visitors and even convert into sales on your own sites. 

3. Gain Topical And Brand Authority

Expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are critical characteristics you need to achieve. 

You might not be aware of this, but Google’s quality rater guidelines specifically talk about this, and authority can be one of the most challenging characteristics to achieve in the real estate industry. 

With high-quality backlinks from another real estate business or a related blog, you send signals to search engines that established and authoritative websites trust you. 

Some of their authority rubs off on your site, just like getting a public endorsement from an influencer. 

4. Opportunities For Networking 

Here’s something that many people don’t take advantage of enough. When you reach out to a real estate business or blog owner and get a live guest post, don’t look at this as a one-and-done exchange. 

Connect with that person through LinkedIn, Facebook, or any other platform, as these relationships could help you in the future with other guest posting opportunities. 

Maybe they own other websites, or they might have connections with other bloggers to put you in touch with. 

There really are endless opportunities here. 

Are Paid Real Estate Guest Posts Risky?

The simple answer is that there’s always some element of risk involved in every type of backlink strategy, and you have to be aware of what kind of things could influence that risk. 

With the benefit of 15+ years of experience, I’ve figured out certain factors that increase risks: 

• Dodgy and dubious-quality websites
• Toxic content
• The ability to identify paid guest posts
• The total cost of a guest post

Here’s what this actually means. 

Low-Quality Sites Can Decrease Search Rankings

If you’ve done any kind of outreach before, you’ll know that a lot of sites will accept guest posts–but that doesn’t mean that all of them will be beneficial. 

What does that mean?

Basically, if you end up with a link from a low-quality website, then the best you can hope for is that it won’t have much of an impact on your search rankings. 

In my experience, it’s quite likely that you end up with negative impacts in the SERPs–in extreme cases, it can even cause manual penalties if Google identifies too many spam backlinks. 

The next section below will give you a better idea about the quality standards you need to consider for real estate business backlinks. 

Toxic Content Sites Can Have Serious Impacts

We’ve already covered the overall website quality as an important factor; now, I want to draw your attention to the impact of toxic content. 

One thing I’ve often encountered during guest blogging outreach is sites that seem to be relevant to the real estate industry when looking at the homepage. 

But if you take a closer look at pages that are actually ranking for the site, they can often be filled with the three Ps: poker, pills, and porn. 

Even if you get a link from a good quality guest post on such a site, the toxic content could have seriously negative impacts on your SEO strategy. 

You have to make it part of your real estate guest posting process to dive deeper into websites. 

More on that shortly. 

Google’s Handling Of Paid Guest Posting

When it comes to guest posting, you’ll often hear that Google will find out if you paid for it and penalize your site. 

However, the reality is very different. 

Yes, it’s true that Google doesn’t like paid guest posts. An article in Search Engine Land last year summed it up with a statement from Google’s John Mueller: “Yes, using guest posts for links is against our spam policies.”

He also suggests that you nofollow such links, which would obviously defeat the entire purpose. 

So what’s really happening?

Basically, unless your guest post links come with very obvious signs that it’s on a website that accepts posts for payment, it’s pretty much impossible for Google to tell if a link is paid or natural. 

Cost Vs. Benefit

There are numerous factors influencing the costs of paid guest posts (I’ll cover these shortly), but even great-quality backlinks from highly relevant websites might come at a price that isn’t worth it. 

I’ve encountered people looking for thousands of dollars for paid guest posts with good website metrics and real traffic. 

But if that backlink doesn’t end up with a significant boost in search rankings, then you could be in a position where two cheaper backlinks might deliver a better cost-benefit ratio. 

How To Find High-Quality Real Estate Guest Posts?

Quality is a vital factor in every link-building strategy, but many people don’t fully appreciate what that means specifically for a real estate guest post. 

Does The Website Look Professionally Designed?

The unfortunate reality is that the Internet is full of websites that were slapped together by people with absolutely no graphic and web design skills. 

Even if there’s quality content in written form, really bad visual design should be a big red flag. 

Here are some questions I aim to answer before I consider investigating a website further: 

• How fast do the pages load?
• What does the site look like on mobile devices?
• Does it contain images of real people and places?
• Is the overall layout and design optimized for better click-through rates?

For real estate websites, that typically means you want to see easy-to-navigate property listings with detailed descriptions of each property and a load of real photos. 

You’ll be surprised how many fake real estate sites are out there when you go through this analysis process. 

What Is The Content Quality?

The main tip I would give you here is to not only look at the content on the homepage or the pages linked to from the homepage. 

It’s very common for website owners to cut corners by having a few highly visible pages with great content, only for the rest of the site to be made up of very poor articles. 

This practice happens quite regularly when it comes to real estate guest posting–the only solution to this is to do a deep dive into the content on the site. 

If you spot many articles with poor grammar, spelling, punctuation, and no signs of any effort put into the content, then that should be a big red flag. 

Does The Site Have A Natural Backlink Profile?

To analyze the backlink profile of websites, you’ll need to invest in tools like Ahrefs, SemRush, or Moz. These SEO tools scrape the Internet and build huge databases of websites and backlinks that you can then filter and research. 

But what do you need to look for in that potential maze of thousands of backlinks?

There are two things I prioritize the most. 

Firstly, I look at the backlink domains to check if they are related to the real estate industry and are actually real businesses and blogs. 

You’ll filter out a lot of dodgy guest post sites this way because they often try to improve their website authority statistics by getting tons of completely unrelated backlinks (here’s a good resource on website authority).

Secondly, I look at the anchor text profile. Even a quick scan of the types of incoming anchor text can reveal if a website has dodgy backlinks like poker, pills, and porn. 

Sites with those kinds of backlinks are toxic, and you should avoid those types of bad backlinks at all costs.  

Does The Site Traffic Look Natural?

Let’s say you’re looking for real estate blogs in America and have found a site that seems to have good quality content, is professionally designed, and has backlinks that look natural as well. 

Even with those positive ticks for your analysis, there’s a chance that the website traffic isn’t clean. 

First of all, you want to see a mix of organic, referral, and direct traffic, as well as visitors from social media platforms. 

But what is even more important to check is the location of the visitors. They should predominantly come from the same country you’re targeting. 

You’ll often find websites gaining large organic traffic in Africa and Asia, with hardly any in America. 

That should also be a big red flag to avoid. 

Are There Proven Search Ranking Improvements?

This final step can give you a lot of confidence that a backlink will have a positive impact on a real estate business website. 

Ask the website owner if they can share proven success stories from clients or their own testing. 

What you’d want to see is a ranking graph with the date a backlink was added that shows some search ranking increases. 

While it is possible to fake such a report, you can use Moz or Ahrefs to try and validate these results. 

It’s not an easy task, but it will increase your success rate. 

What Influences Guest Post Pricing?

OK, you’ve now got a blueprint for filtering through real estate guest posting opportunities; now it’s time to figure out what you should pay. 

Guest Post Website Authority

The more authoritative a website is, the more link juice will flow your way and the more you have to expect to pay for the guest post. 

In the real estate market, highly authoritative backlinks from well-known industry websites can cost thousands of dollars. 

But you don’t have to aim that high to achieve great results. Just do your homework and research, as described in the previous section, and avoid sites with faked domain ratings. 

Website Traffic Sources

You’ll find that some websites get tons of traffic from social media and paid advertising. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you really want backlinks from sites that have real organic search traffic. 

Real estate blogs that can show you their traffic sources broken down by search engines and country will be a lot more valuable, and you should be willing to pay more for them. 

This is what the traffic location sources look like for Remax.com:

As you’d expect, the vast majority of traffic comes from the US, and this looks completely natural. 

Quality Of The Backlink Profile

The quality and number of the backlinks pointing to the guest posting site will influence the link juice going to your site. 

Look out for backlinks from industry-relevant and authoritative websites–the more of these you find, the more valuable a guest post will be. 

Also, look out for signs of dodgy backlinks. These can negatively impact your SEO strategy and are not worth paying for. 

Content Quality Standards

Any time you find websites that accept guest posts and have very clear requirements for content quality, it is a good sign. 

The stricter the guest post guidelines are, the better. You also want to check that those guidelines are enforced on all the existing content. 

It’s a sign of higher-than-average content quality and is worth paying more for. 

Just keep in mind that these guidelines may also drive up your content creation costs. 

More on that shortly. 

Content Placement

Real estate bloggers don’t always have the SEO skills to fully appreciate how internal links have a huge impact on their sites and the quality of the backlinks they provide. 

But if you find sites with strong signs of interlinking, that’s a huge plus. 

At the very least, you should expect that your guest post has an internal link path that you can follow from the homepage. 

If there are no internal links pointing at the guest post, then it will turn into an orphan page, which will severely limit the link juice and value. 

Additional Guest Posting Costs

All guest bloggers have to be fully aware of the additional factors that influence the overall costs. 

Content Creation Costs

Real estate bloggers tend to be very strict about the content they allow on their sites. That means you need to provide an article about a relevant topic that is well-researched and engaging. 

Basically, you can’t just hire a $4 per 1,000 words writer and expect the article to be accepted. 

You’ll need to find someone with experience writing about real estate, and that will drive up your costs. 

Content Editing Costs

Bloggers and business owners who accept guest posts should give you clear guidelines about content quality, structure, and layout. 

You’ll either have to factor in the additional time it will take you to edit the article yourself or hire an editor to do this for you. 

You don’t want to end up submitting an article that doesn’t conform to the guidelines and end up having to rewrite it. 

Content Promotion Costs

Some guest post sites will offer an additional service where they will promote the content on social media and through paid advertising. 

It’s often worth paying for this when available, as it can drive additional referral traffic to your site. 

Alternatively, you can run a paid AdWords or social media advertising campaign for the real estate guest post. 

Either way, this will have to come out of your guest post budget, so make sure you plan for it. 

Quality Is Vital For Real Estate Guest Posting 

Finding high-quality real estate websites can be quite a challenging task, but as soon as you start cutting corners, you’ll lower your return on investment and even risk negative search ranking results. 

With the above game plan for assessing quality and filtering out all the dodgy link farms, you’ll be in the best possible position for a successful SEO strategy. 

When you start eliminating far more websites than you accept, you’ll know that you’re on the right track.

It’ll take lots of time and resources, but you’ll be building a backlink profile that has stood the test of time and countless Google updates.