An SEO Strategy (need review)

[AFW1179]

I work in the real estate vertical. My clients possess significant content. Though it's not written. They have tons of images and plenty of videos. They have content in the form of descriptions of homes etc... They don't have written content that would be valuable in an attempt to rank. Most traffic in real estate vertical is [city] real estate and [city] homes for sale. Agents rarely ever use those phrases. Certainly not when doing what they do, promoting their listings.

I am thinking I need to build a link building strategy around their videos and photos. There are tons of high domain sources to get links from. With video I could do youtube, vimeo, veoh, daily motion, hulu, etc... All of these sites are DA 90+. None of the links are follow. They would all be no follow. I could have a profile back link, and a back link on each video. So one video distributed to 10 sites would be worth 10 back links. So a client would build hundreds of backlinks a year. All of value. I could deep link all the back links to appropriate subdivision landing pages (long tail).

The same strategy is applicable with photos. There are dozens of high DA sites that syndicate images. All would result in a lot of links that are high DA with no-follow.

Please discuss this strategy. Also, if you can think of another strategy to build back links for real estate then please share it. I want to discuss real ground level back link building. Not "just build content and they will come."  I need the sites to rank. I don't know if no-follows will even help them rank for long tail keywords.

[RyanPurkey]

For me the bigger question is how does this content engage users?  Are the videos and images something they could use through a Creative Commons license? Are they photos that could be tied into some other uses?  Ultimately you want your content to build links for you.  Cheers!

[AFW1179]

The videos and images are of homes for sale. It is unlikely that individuals will use them on any other website. The goal is that building links from the profile pages/channels/video excerpts.

[RyanPurkey]

Ok. So basically you're creating a distributed archive of all this footage.  The trick for you though is to figure out how people might be interested in using and interacting with the content. That will go a lot farther in terms of links and engagement than just the profiles.

[AFW1179]

I don't think we are going in the same direction.

How would you build backlinks for a real estate client? Avoid trying to sell me on "create content" because no one will link to it. Real Estate is dominated by brands like Zillow, Redfin, Trulia, Realtor.com etc... Agents websites on avg have about a 10 DA. There isn't a lot to work with. I am looking for ideas.

[RyanPurkey]

Here's some more ideas: http://www.inman.com/2015/02/20/5-steps-to-creating-viral-real-estate-blog-posts/ and http://neilpatel.com/2014/12/30/how-to-build-high-quality-backlinks-in-a-scalable-way/

It is possible, but you have to come up with ways to do it.  The more you try to 'build links' the harder it'll be to get the site ranking well.

[AFW1179]

I appreciate your help. I am looking to discuss link building as a topic. Not that what you suggest would not build links but in my opinion the methodology you suggest is more along the lines of content marketing with a secondary benefit of link acquisition. I am looking for cold solid links on site. In my (significant) experience, clients won't pay for content marketing if it's not getting results. It can't get results consistently because of so many variables. A link builder needs to be building links.

[RyanPurkey]

I see. In my opinion monetizing based on the number of links you build isn't a likely sustainable long term model. Good luck though!

[AFW1179]

Ryan, I would like your participation in the discussion. However, I fear you are hearing what you want to hear and not what I am saying. I didn't say I wanted to charge based on the number of links I build. I want to charge based on results. I don't believe I will achieve consistent, sustainable results marketing content and praying someone links to the content.

For some industries that strategy works great. SEO, Web Design, etc... Where the average user has a website and understands how to use it. For real estate, there is not a lot of people going to link to a real estate website. Certainly no real estate agent will link to another one. They could lose their clients. Furthermore, the industry is dominated by brands. None of those brands will link to agents. Even the agent profile pages don't have links. The ones that do you must pay for and they are no-follow.

I'm asking you to participate in the discussion but understand there is not one strategy to seo in all niches. People will not link to real estate websites. It is why if you pull up your local agent websites you will see they have DA around 10. Just google [city] real estate and [city] homes for sale. You will see the brand sites dominate the serps. Second page you will start seeing local realtor websites. All of which have nearly no authority.

Help me out! As a community we can think of something.