How Many Backlinks Does it Take to Start Ranking Your Real Estate Website in Google?
You’re working to build backlinks to your real estate website… But after a few successes, you’re still not seeing an impact. You’re starting to wonder, “How many backlinks does it take to rank my real estate website in Google?” After all, you’re busy building a business and you don’t have loads of time to guest blog for backlinks. You have better, more important things to do. Still, it would be nice to outrank your competition on page 1 with some well-placed backlinks. That’d mean passive traffic, high-quality leads, and less work/money to generate results. Problem is, the way you’re building backlinks isn’t all that efficient and you’re not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel – which makes you wonder, “Will this ever work?” That’s why I’m going to give you a general idea for how many backlinks you’ll need to start outranking your competition and then I’ll show you some quick, easy ways to build backlinks. Let’s get started. How Many Backlinks do you Need to Outrank your Competition? While I’d love to answer that question with a specific number of backlinks… I can’t. The answer depends on how many backlinks your competitors are building, your existing domain authority, your competitor’s domain authority, your overall SEO strategy, the quality of the backlinks you build, and a whole slew of other factors. Having said that, though, there are a few things you should know about SEO in general when trying to increase your rankings with backlinks. First off, the higher your current domain authority, the more difficult it is to increase your SEO power. (Image Source) The same goes for where you’re currently ranking for your target keyword phrase. (Image Source) This just means that the more SEO authority you have, the harder it is to increase that authority with backlinks. In the beginning, one or two high-quality backlinks might increase your domain authority and rankings significantly. As your website becomes more established, though, the competition gets increasingly fierce. Of course, that also depends on how competitive your market is. A friend and I put up a Carrot real estate investor website in Klamath Falls, Oregon – a low-competition market – and in just a week, the website was ranking 6th on the first page without us doing anything. Since you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that didn’t happen in your market. Which means you’ll need to put some energy into building quality backlinks. But here’s the thing… Not All Backlinks are Created Equal Some backlinks are more powerful than others. And these are the factors that determine how impactful any given backlink is on your rankings. Anchor Text Anchor text is the hyperlinked words that a backlink sits upon. (Image Source) Why is that important? Because Google factors in anchor text when determining what the linked-to page is about and in determining how relevant your page is to the phrase you’re trying to rank for. For instance, a backlink with anchor text that says, “Sell your home fast” would have a more positive impact on your rankings than anchor text that says “the market is healthy right now” or something else vague and irrelevant to your target keyword phrase. When building backlinks, try to get anchor text that is relevant to the keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for. Domain Authority The domain authority and page authority of the page where you receive a backlink from helps determine how impactful that backlink is on your own domain authority. The higher the domain authority of the website you received a backlink from, the bigger impact it’ll have your website. What is domain authority? It’s the general score (1-100) … Continued