Rent.com is one of the largest apartment rental marketplaces in the United States. Its traffic is won or lost on city-level searches — “apartments for rent in Chicago”, “cheap apartments in Denver”, “Plano TX apartments” — where it competes against every other national listings site, page by page.
Each of those city pages needs its own authority to rank. At Rent.com’s scale, that means a link-building programme that can deliver volume every month without letting quality slip.
City-page targeting. Rather than pointing links at the homepage, we spread them across 89 city apartment pages — from Chicago, Charlotte and Seattle to Plano, Columbus and Fort Collins — so authority landed on the pages that rank for local rental searches.
Natural, varied anchors. Anchors mirrored how people actually search: city-plus-apartments phrases, “cheap apartments in…”, and plenty of partial-match and descriptive variations to keep the profile natural.
Relevant publishers, one link each. Every placement was an editorial guest post on a real-estate, home, lifestyle, travel or careers site. Across the campaign, 774 links came from 773 different domains, with a median Domain Rating of 48 and 358 links from DR 50+ sites.
Monthly reporting and replacements. Each month Rent.com received a full link report — URL, DR, anchor, target and publish date — and any link that dropped was replaced. We ran a parallel campaign of around 750 guest posts for its sister brand, Apartment Guide.
Between January 2023 and June 2024, Rent.com’s estimated US organic traffic grew from 3.29 million to 4.72 million visits a month (+43%), peaking at 5.18 million in May 2024. Keywords ranking in Google’s top 10 rose from 649,792 to 785,544 — more than 135,000 additional page-one rankings — and keywords in positions 11–20 grew 32%, lining up the next wave.
The estimated value of that organic traffic rose from $880,000 to $1.24 million a month — what the same clicks would cost in Google Ads.
Source: SE Ranking estimates, US database, January 2023 vs June 2024. Links from the Four Dots link report, Feb 2023 – Jun 2024.
