Strategically placed, valuable and functional backlinks can drive more traffic to your real estate website, helping people from external online destinations reach you. However, those links quickly frustrate site users when broken. Improving your backlinking efforts by fixing those broken links can strengthen your SEO.
How Do Broken Links Happen?
One of the most common ways you get broken backlinks is if someone links to a page on your real estate website that no longer exists or is now in a different location within the site’s structure. Another possibility is that the URLs are in the wrong format and include extra characters.
How Can You Find Broken Backlinks on Your Site?
Many SEO tools have specific features to help users find broken backlinks. If your chosen tool can generate a site audit report, that content will likely include more details about the broken backlinks. Alternatively, some Chrome browser extensions work in the background to flag broken links as you move through a site’s pages.
Some tools also automatically check for broken links on your website, ensuring that you can stay on top of the situation and prevent it from worsening over time.
Why Does Fixing Broken Links Help Your Real Estate Business?
Search engines use bots to crawl websites and index the content. If those tools come across broken backlinks pointing to your site, you miss out on a potential SEO boost. Ranking well in search engines will naturally attract more people to your site since most internet users only browse through the first few pages of results before navigating to the sites that seem more relevant.
Outside of SEO, people may get the wrong impression about your real estate site if they go to a link that formerly pointed to it and see it no longer works. Although most will likely get mildly frustrated and move on, some may assume your real estate agency went out of business.
Addressing broken backlinks lets you correct wrong assumptions. More importantly, it creates opportunities for more people to become interested in your agency. Statistics indicate that 56% of people recommend trustworthy companies to their loved ones. A functioning link to your site helps you build more business relationships with people who may become new clients and eventually recommend your business to those they know.
How to Align Backlinking Strategy With Business and Marketing Plans
Fixing broken links may seem like a relatively minor part of your overall business objectives. However, when done right, it supports your business and marketing plans, appeals to your stakeholders, and assures them that you have carefully considered how to keep your business viable in the long term.
1. Show You Understand Your Audience
When developing a business or marketing plan, one of the most important things to do is understand the various needs of your target audience. Then, you can research your biggest competitors and develop compelling ways to differentiate your services from what they offer.
The people who arrive at your real estate business site may want to:
- Sell their current property.
- Buy a home or commercial building.
- Learn more about the general market.
- Discuss relocating to the area soon.
A strong business plan should identify a market need and aim to solve a specific problem. One of your fundamental goals is to cater to particular audience segments and show them you have the knowledge and expertise to assist them.
The people in the above list all have slightly different needs, but the commonality is the need for a reputable real estate professional to guide them through the process. Buying and selling properties are milestone activities for most households. Understanding their priorities helps you earn their trust while showing potential investors and others interested in your business that you deeply understand the target market.
2. Increase Potential Customer Visibility
Once you know the market and have determined how your real estate agency will fill a need, your marketing plan can focus on developing strategies to establish and grow your customer base.
Backlinking allows you to develop a solid reputation and visible presence by appearing as part of the online destinations that your potential customers naturally visit. Since you’ve already learned about your potential customers’ needs while making a business plan, why not apply that knowledge to your marketing efforts through backlinking?
Your website is the tool that makes many people aware of your business for the first time. Backlinks are an SEO signal that identifies authoritative content. Suppose you can develop your site’s content to inform and engage visitors while creating a backlink profile with numerous high-quality and organic links. Those efforts should pay off by making your business more visible in the search results.
3. Enhance Your Reputation in the Local Industry
Link building is an excellent way to show others that you are a great choice in the real estate market. It works exceptionally well when most of your backlinks come from sites that bring you new customers, such as local business directories or real estate blogs.
Broken link building capitalizes on those positive effects because it helps people seamlessly find your content. When someone clicks on an outdated link to your website that no longer works, they probably won’t take the time to navigate there through other means.
The internet is so vast that there are plenty of other places to capture their attention. However, the more you can do to help them find your site and have enjoyable experiences there, the better your chances of growing your client roster while reducing your bounce rate.
How to Fix Broken Backlinks to Improve Your Site
Broken links are more common on the internet than you might think. A 2024 report included 10 years of data and showed 38% of websites functional within a 2013 snapshot were no longer reachable a decade later. Fortunately, they’re fixable, and focusing on them improves SEO results and visibility to potential customers.
1. Use Analytics Dashboards and SEO Tools
Using Google Analytics can show you the pages on your site that cause 404 errors. Getting those details allows you to redirect those backlinks to suitable functional pages. Alternatively, if you pay for specialized SEO tools, most platforms have features that screen for problematic external links. You can usually see which external website contains the broken link leading to your site and the intended destination.
2. Send Users Elsewhere With 301 Redirects
Creating 301 redirects tells browsers that webpages have permanently moved to a new location. Using them prevents people from seeing 404 error messages. Always find similar, newer content for users to replace the outdated pages if you use this strategy. Most publishing tools have user-friendly interfaces that allow you to specify the old URL and the desired new one.
3. Contact the Site Owner to Request a Fix
If external broken links occur because someone at another site made a URL formatting mistake, the best option is to politely contact them and explain how you found the error. Point out the problem and ask them to take care of it.
4. Create a Branded 404 Page
Another option is to create a functional 404 error page that shows visitors your website still works and encourages them to browse its content to find what they need. Consider including aspects such as a branded header and useful links. Then, you can still grab people’s attention and nurture their interest despite the dysfunctional backlink.
Frequently Asked Questions About Broken Link Building for Real Estate Backlinking
Explore some of the most commonly asked questions users have about broken backlinks below.
What Is a Broken Backlink?
A broken backlink occurs when someone inserts a link on their website that goes to yours, but that link no longer functions, usually showing people a 404 Error/Page Not Found message.
Why Should You Get Broken Backlinks Fixed?
These are easy SEO wins for your website because there is no need to approach entirely new prospects to earn backlinks. Instead, you can focus on reestablishing an existing website contact and improving your backlinks by making the problematic links usable again.
Why Are Broken Links So Common?
Although periodically updating your site is generally advantageous, it can result in broken links if content gets moved or deleted. Broken links can also happen if URLs are in the incorrect format.
What Is an Effective Way to Get Quick, Impactful Results With Broken Link Building?
Target the broken backlinks with the highest page authority and domain authority first. That approach will give you the most obvious and fastest results. Seeing those early wins can motivate you to take care of the rest.
Using Broken Link Building for a Competitive Advantage
In addition to finding broken links associated with your website, you can take an extra step by discovering them on competitor’s sites, especially if the content relates to a keyword for which you want to rank. If you try this strategy, consider contacting the site owner to alert them to the broken links. Then, mention that your site has similar and more recent content that would make an excellent replacement.
This approach allows you to expand your backlink profile with new sites while positioning yourself as helpful and detail-oriented. That could be enough to get site owners to take you seriously and agree the content you offer is worth linking to for relevance.
Tackle Your Broken Backlinks Today
Link building is a well-established SEO strategy, but it becomes much less effective if many sites link to pages on your real estate website that no longer exist. Start addressing the problem now to get it under control and keep it manageable. Succeeding will increase your search engine rankings and help more people find your website and learn about your services.
