Building Backlinks for Homes.com via City Ranking Campaigns
Local rankings. National coverage.
We created data-driven city ranking campaigns that earned hundreds of high-quality backlinks and media placements from outlets across the country.
Homes.com is a real estate platform that helps users find homes for sale and rent across the United States. It offers property listings, neighborhood insights, and tools for buyers, renters, and real estate professionals—making the home search experience faster, easier, and more informed.
goals
Boosting visibility through smart Digital PR
Homes.com, one of the largest real estate portals in the U.S., sought out our digital PR agency to help with the following goals:
- Diversify their backlink profile
- Improve visibility in search results
- Increase brand exposure and awareness
- Drive more organic traffic to their site
Our team knew that focused link-building campaigns could help achieve these goals and more, so we incorporated them as a key piece to their overall digital marketing strategy.
To attract links from top-tier publications, our team developed a plan to center Homes.com’s content on topics that would pique the interest of real estate writers and also incorporate a local element. This way, we could generate valuable backlinks from both high-authority national websites as well as local news sites and resources.
Services
strategy
City rankings tailored for every generation
For this link building campaign, in particular, we wanted to create a piece of content that uniquely ranked cities on a number of different factors. We researched relevant topics in both pop culture and the real estate industry and found that generational comparisons are hot topics across many news organizations. As a result, our team created the “Best Cities for Each Generation” link-building campaign. We connected this topic with Homes.com’s brand through the angle of the home search.
In order to execute this campaign, we created a city ranking for each generation based on their needs and preferences. City ranking is a common content format, but our team put a spin on it by creating a unique city ranking for each generation.
The generations and calculation data points were:
- Millennials: Median home price, entry-level jobs per 100,000 people, and percentage of the local population that is part of the Millennial generation
- Generation X: School quality, management jobs per 100,000 people, and percentage of the local population that is part of the Gen X generation
- Baby Boomers: Retiree tax-friendliness, doctors per 100,000 people, and percentage of the local population that is part of the Baby Boomer generation
The resulting graphics were created to appeal to news sites and encourage social shares. The Go Fish design team created map graphics that plotted the top cities based on our criteria and included detailed tables containing the full datasets used in the rankings.
We focused our campaign outreach on three main beats: local/regional, real estate, and general lifestyle sites.
We split up each local pitch by generation and targeted local news sites that were cited in the campaign as one of the best U.S. cities in our research. We also focused on national publications and writers who cover topics relating to real estate.
results
Visibility that continues
Increasing high authority links to homes.comto grow
20+
Links and citations earned.
Top-tier outlets like The New York Times and Yahoo picked up the campaign.
4,000+
Unique visitors during promotion.
Engaging, data-driven content attracted meaningful on-site traffic.
44
Total backlinks to date.
Ongoing coverage continues to build SEO value post-campaign.
This campaign was successful in a number of ways. During the promotional period, the campaign:
- Earned over 20 links and citations including coverage from highly authoritative sites such as The New York Times, Fox Business, Yahoo, and Reader’s Digest
- Drove over 4,000 unique visitors to the site
Since completing outreach on this campaign, we have seen additional successes such as:
- Continued coverage on real estate sites and blogs, with the backlink total growing from 20 to 44.
- Continued organic traffic to the landing page, with sessions now over 6,200
This campaign proved to be a valuable link building opportunity because it increased the number of high authority websites linking to Homes.com. Additionally, this content piece served the target audience of Homes.com’s blog. Some SEO campaigns are just for link-building, whereas this one stands on its own in providing useful information for the Homes.com community.
This campaign continues to be a valuable post on Homes.com’s blog, and we expect it to continuously bring in additional organic traffic as the keyword rankings continue to improve with the backlinks generated to the page.
Ready to improve your rankings and increase your traffic?
Get a custom proposal from Go Fish!