The Client:
A newly licensed real estate agent in San Marcos, Texas, looking to establish a competitive online presence in a crowded local market.
The Starting Point:
When we started working together, this agent had made a few initial sales but had no website and no real digital footprint. Their marketing consisted of occasional Facebook Lives and traditional networking, but they knew that to become a serious player, they needed to own their local search results and start generating consistent inbound leads from Google.
The Challenge:
The San Marcos real estate market is highly competitive, dominated by well-established brokerages with years of local SEO history and deep marketing budgets. To break into the top of search results, the agent needed to out-strategize larger competitors and convince Google they were the most relevant and trusted choice for buyers and sellers in the area.
The Approach:
Since we were starting from scratch, we had the advantage of building a clean, fully optimized foundation. The strategy came down to nailing the fundamentals and performing a deep competitive analysis to find opportunities where the established players were leaving gaps.
Here’s what we did:
- Built a fully optimized website from the ground up, ensuring technical SEO was flawless from day one.
- Conducted a detailed competitor analysis, studying what the top-ranking agents and brokerages were doing – and identifying what they weren’t doing.
- Optimized his Google My Business listing to align perfectly with Google’s preferences for local real estate searches.
- Leveraged Facebook Lives to generate initial visibility and engagement while the website gained traction in search.
- Developed a hyper-local content strategy, creating pages and blog posts targeting neighborhoods, property types, and common buyer and seller questions.
- Built relevance-first backlinks by securing local citations, real estate directory listings, and community collaborations to strengthen the agent’s local authority.
The Roadblocks:
The biggest challenge was competing with full-service brokerages, whose larger websites and established backlink profiles gave them a natural advantage. To overcome this, we focused on:
- Precision targeting of long-tail hyper-local keywords, where we could win faster.
- Building backlinks with true local relevance, ensuring Google saw this agent as deeply connected to San Marcos – not just another generic real estate site.
The Results:
Within a couple of months, the agent secured #1 rankings for the most valuable keywords in their market:
- San Marcos Realtor
- San Marcos Real Estate
- San Marcos Real Estate Agent
The impact was immediate and transformational:
- Daily inbound calls and inquiries directly from Google search.
- Organic traffic became the primary driver of new business.
- The agent quickly rose to become a top producer in their office, standing out not just for their sales skills but for owning their online presence in a way that even established competitors couldn’t match.
The Lessons:
This project reinforced a foundational truth:
Mastering the fundamentals – combined with a clear-eyed competitive analysis – beats expensive ad spend.
It also proved:
If you find the gaps your competitors ignore, you can outrank even the biggest players.
What I’d Do Differently Today:
If I repeated this process today, I would add:
- Owned media assets, like a personal real estate blog or a branded local news site, to create even more ranking opportunities.
- Content syndication, ensuring the agent’s expertise showed up not just on their own site but across local directories, community blogs, podcasts, and social platforms.
- Proactive digital PR, positioning the agent as a local real estate expert through guest articles, podcast appearances, and media interviews.
