If you want your real estate investing website to rank high on the search engine results page for the target keywords in your real estate market, your SEO has to be on point. It’s a basic requirement: good SEO bumps your website high on the SERP. This brings organic traffic and more opportunities to convert visitors into leads.
Internal linking is one of the most straightforward website optimization techniques, yet sometimes real estate investors struggle with it. Usually, this happens because investors don’t have a lot of content on their websites, or because they don’t know how to interlink the posts that are already published. In this article, we will explore internal linking for real estate investing websites and we will provide advice that’ll hopefully help you to successfully get started.
But before we delve deeper into the issue of internal linking, note that these tips are for those real estate investors who want to do SEO on their own. We offer a bootcamp-style coaching where this and other SEO tweaks are discussed and practically applied to real estate investing websites. And if you don’t want to learn about internal linking, you can hire someone else to do it for you. We offer that as well.
Even if you don’t know a lot about online marketing, you’re probably aware that SEO covers many website elements, both on-site and off-site. This includes keyword research, domain name, content, alternative tags, headlines and meta descriptions, accessibility (mobile-friendly design, quick page load times), link building, etc. So where do internal links fit within general SEO?
Often, internal linking is discussed in terms of improving site navigation or building site architecture, but it’s rarely explained what that actually entails.
An internal link is a hyperlink between two pages within the same website. So, it’s great for connecting two posts that cover similar topics (for example, an article about your in-house processes and a post on probate properties). But it’s more than just a way to connect two blog posts.
If done right, it can serve more than one function in on-site SEO, like:
Let’s check how each of these functions works.
Despite it’s label, which might sound intimidating, site architecture is very simple. It concerns organization of information that’s available through the pages on your website. For instance, if you want to prioritize a specific post (“We buy houses cash in X”), you place it at a prominent spot in the website and you set it as a landing page (or the page where visitors are directed after they click on an ad). And as you follow the internal links on that page, you get an idea about the website.
This is how search engines scan websites to be able to rank them. A piece of software known as search engine crawlers is tasked with indexing pages within your site and checking the content on them (mostly for keyword metrics). So, if your internal links help these search engine crawlers to easily navigate the posts published on the website, then you have good site architecture.
Since site architecture is important for ranking, website designers develop plans for distribution of content on different pages. This goes hand in hand with the content strategy, with topic clusters (or posts bundled based on topical relevance) being the most common strategy out there. How does this work?
Let’s say your real estate investing website is designed to bring leads for a market that spans throughout one county. You can create content for one central page in the topic cluster (the pillar page) dedicated to buying houses in the county. As you cover the topic, you can include one paragraph on each individual ZIP code or neighborhood within the county. If you create a separate page for each sub topic (“Sell your house in A, in X county,” “Sell your house in B, in X county,” etc.) you can add an internal link that takes website visitors from the pillar page to posts on sub topics.
This is how you establish your authority on the subject, particularly when it comes to search engine crawlers. When crawlers scan a website with a good site architecture, it’s easier for them to index new blog posts and to rank your real estate investing website higher for a certain keyword.
Website templates from real estate investing services like Carrot, already have some structure for internal linking in place, but you still need to tweak them, because it’s not only crawlers that access the pages.
You create content to appease not only search engine crawlers, but website visitors as well. In fact, if the content is good enough for your visitors (quality content, keywords, internal links, etc.) it will probably be good enough for the crawlers as well, Internal links can keep visitors on your pages longer, which affects metrics like dwell time and bumps up your ranking as a result.
This can drive engagement as well, especially if you place internal links at critical junctions within the content post, where the topic can weer off into another relevant discussion. To make things clearer, let’s check out an example from real estate investing.
Suppose you create a post to describe your in-house process to motivated sellers, something along the lines of “What does it takes to sell your house to us?” In this post you explain step 1 (sharing contact details), step 2 (house inspection), step 3 (non binding offer), step 4 (due diligence on property paperwork), etc.
If a website visitor understands steps 1 and 3 but they don’t get how step 2 works, a link to a post that delves deeper into this sub topic would be great for increasing their dwell time on your site. These days, a homeowner can find the information one way or another online, but if your internal linking helps them to transition from one blog post to the next seamlessly, you’ve got them on your site instead of going off to someone else’s site for the answer.
Google algorithms on ranking websites based on visitor engagements aren’t at all clear, but it is a consensus within the online marketing community that user experience is very important. User experience (or UX) includes all sort of interactions with website visitors, however, internal links can definitely help you keep motivated sellers longer, and increase the likelihood of converting with you.
This has probably happened to you already: for no apparent reason, some posts perform better than others. It’s true for social media and it’s true for content on your real estate investing website as well.
When you have a post that attracts the attention of motivated sellers, you better amplify it’s effect as much as possible. Internal links embedded in a well performing piece will help you redirect visitors to other posts.
Of course, the end goal is to get more house seller leads, not to have visitors spend extra time on your website, however, it’s a sort of a rule of thumb – people who educate themselves on your website are likely to convert at some stage.
Now, let’s turn to actionable and practical tips.
As you publish content on your website, you’ll become better at choosing and placing internal links. In the meantime, you can benefit from keeping the following tips in mind.
Real estate investors usually follow the one keyword – one-page rule. Each of these articles is a potential internal link when you create content on other topics. While we advocate producing many pieces, this doesn’t mean that you should disregard post quality, so make sure the content is worthwhile.
Internal links help boost ranking, and they work best when they go from an article that already ranks high for a keyword, to an article that doesn’t rank. It’s also known as lending link juice, or passing value from one page to another, by using hyperlinks. This applies to external links, but you can also benefit from establishing internal links between the posts on your real estate investing website.
It’s the clickable part of the link (the highlighted hyperlink) and as such it stands out when crawlers index your real estate investing website. It’s recommended to use keywords as anchor text, but don’t over do it. Search engine crawlers used to reward the use of keywords as anchor text with high ranking. However, marketers ruined this for everyone (by overstuffing keywords in posts), so now the ranking algorithms don’t rely as heavily on anchor text keywords.
Internal links should make it easier to get what your website is about. They should help motivated sellers and ranking software to navigate all articles available on the website. Internal links should come naturally as people read or crawlers index. You can’t prioritize either one of these (search engine crawlers or website visitors), because that will disrupt the balance between keyword placement, high quality content, and dwell time, effectively lowering your ranking.
Make sure you take website visitors to an article that is relevant for the topic. For example, don’t send someone who’s reading an article on selling a house during divorce to an article on making your house cozy for the holidays. Don’t force internal links in your posts for the sake of building site architecture, because if the hyperlink isn’t meaningful to the visitor, you are actually doing yourself disservice.
Develop a content creation strategy based on topic clusters (pillar topics and sub topics). It makes internal linking an easier task because you’ll have a written scheme for the relation between individual posts. This will not only improve your ranking, but will also make content planning easier. If done right, topic clusters can allow you to schedule production of articles for your real estate investing website months in advance.
Too many internal links are a red flag. Add an internal link every 300 words or so, but not more often than that. When relevant, you can link to half a dozen articles within a sentence of two, but avoid doing this in more than two paragraphs of the post.
Backlinks are the ultimate goal of SEO for real estate investing websites. You can amplify the effect of whatever backlinks you’ve secured by placing internal links throughout the article that has received a backlink. This goes back to the concept of link juice spilling over from a well performing piece to a less known piece. Link juice works with backlinks as well, and internal links serve to keep visitors engaged.
Internal links are useful for boosting the SEO of your real estate investing website. It really doesn’t take much to connect articles that are otherwise separate, but the benefits are multiple.
You can make site navigation easy for both crawlers and website visitors through strategic use of internal linking. Also, you can make the most of backlinks and posts that perform well by being deliberate in how you interlink content.
Follow the tips we shared and your SEO will bring better results.
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