Custom Home Builder SEO Case Study

6 months 546% session growth for a 90-year-old Texas home builder.

SEO Yodha partnered with Tilson Homes — a build-on-your-land custom home builder operating in Texas since 1932 — to turn nine decades of offline reputation into online demand, and to own the searches Texans run the moment they decide to build on land they already own — inside two quarters.
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See How It Works
Sessions
6,521 → 42,163
0 %
Total users
6,842 → 33,617
+ 0 %
Clicks from Google
5,842 → 18,764
0 %
Search impressions
68,425 → 248,617
0 %
The client

About The Tilson Homes

Tilson Homes has been building new homes on customers’ own land in Texas since 1932 — more than 90 years, across four generations of Texas families. From its Houston headquarters the company builds near Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Waco, Dallas and Fort Worth, and deep into rural Texas, with buyers able to select a build county from more than 130 across the state.
The business is unusual in its category. Tilson doesn’t sell finished houses in a subdivision; it builds a chosen floor plan on land the buyer already owns. That makes the customer journey start far earlier and run far longer than a typical new-home purchase — land, financing, permitting and timeline questions all come long before anyone books a design centre visit.
Custom home building
Build on your land
Floor plans
Model homes
Design centres
Home financing
Energy efficiency
Design galleries
Warranty & support
Virtual & video tours
Homebuyer seminars
LOCATIONS – Texas — Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas–Fort Worth, Waco, plus rural counties statewide
SERVICES – Technical SEO · Local SEO · Content · Digital PR & link building · GA4 measurement
Timeframe – 6-month comparison — first month of engagement against the sixth month
In business since – 1932 — 90+ years building on customer-owned land in Texas
Scope of work

6 problems standing between 90 years of reputation and page one

Ninety years of reputation, five major metros, hundreds of pages — and almost none of it converting into search demand. Six problems stood between Tilson and the Texans already looking for exactly what it builds.
Competition

One of the most expensive categories in local search

National production builders, regional build-on-your-lot competitors and lead-generation marketplaces all chase the same terms. In home building a single ranking can be worth a six-figure contract, so every commercial-intent keyword was already crowded and defended.

Visibility

Impressions without clicks

The site was being shown 68,425 times a month in Google but earning only 5,842 clicks. Google understood the brand — it simply wasn't placing Tilson where people click. None of the core category terms held a top-three position when the engagement began.

Sales cycle

A six-to-eighteen month decision, and no funnel to match

Nobody searches "custom home builder" and signs a build contract that afternoon. Buyers spend months on land, budget, financing and plan research first. The site had strong bottom-of-funnel assets and almost nothing built for the research months that decide who gets the appointment.

Geography

Statewide footprint, statewide language

Tilson builds across 130+ Texas counties and five metros, but the site largely spoke in statewide terms. There was little for Google to match against searches naming Austin, San Antonio, Waco, Fort Worth or the smaller rural markets where build-on-your-land demand is strongest.

Content

Buyers search costs and land, not job titles

The real entry queries are "cost to build a house on my land in Texas," "do I need a permit to build on my own land," "construction financing for a custom home." Those questions were barely covered, so the earliest and cheapest touchpoints were going to competitors and forums.

Structure & measurement

A deep site with weak signals and thin tracking

Floor plans, galleries, tours and model homes created large volumes of near-duplicate and filtered URLs competing with each other. Internal linking was thin, schema incomplete, and GA4 logged just 6,784 events in the baseline month — brochure downloads, call and text taps, seminar RSVPs and form starts were effectively invisible.

Scope of work

The 6-phase build, in the order it had to happen

The sequence mattered as much as the work. Publishing content before the keyword map was set would have pitted plan pages, location pages and blog posts against each other; building location pages before the technical layer was fixed would have buried them in crawl waste.
01 — Assessment

Keyword research & intent mapping

Built a four-tier keyword map — research ("cost to build a house on your land in Texas"), category ("custom home builder," "home construction companies"), product ("4 bedroom farmhouse floor plan") and location ("home builders near me," "Texas home builders") — then assigned every term to exactly one owning page so plan, location and blog pages stopped cannibalising each other.

02 — Diagnosis

Technical SEO & site health

Cleaned up crawl waste from filtered and paginated plan URLs, consolidated near-duplicate plan variants with correct canonicals, improved Core Web Vitals and mobile usability on media-heavy gallery and tour templates, and deployed HomeAndConstructionBusiness, Service, FAQ, Review, VideoObject and Event schema across the relevant templates.

03 — AAlignment

On-page optimisation across the money pages

Rewrote titles, meta descriptions, headings and body copy across the floor plan library, model homes, our process, quality construction, energy efficiency and EasyBuy financing pages — matching how Texas landowners actually phrase the decision, not how the industry names its departments.

04 — Mobilisation

Local SEO & build-area expansion

Built and optimised metro and county-level build-area pages for Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas–Fort Worth, Waco and priority rural markets; optimised Google Business Profiles for design centres and model home locations with services, photos and Q&A; corrected NAP across directories; and drove review velocity to compete in the Map Pack for "home builders near me."

05 — Strengthening

Full-funnel content engine & internal linking

Ran a publishing calendar built around the real build journey — land evaluation, site prep and utilities, construction financing, permits, build timelines, plan selection, design choices — and wired every article back to the floor plans, model homes and build-area pages it supports.

06 — Maintenance

Authority building, measurement & iteration

Earned local citations, supplier and trade mentions and regional coverage, rebuilt GA4 event tracking so brochure downloads, call and text taps, seminar registrations, MyTILSON signups, favourites and form starts are all measured, then reviewed Search Console and GA4 monthly to expand what moved and cut what didn't.

Results — 6-month comparison

6 metrics, 6 months, every one up

Two quarters in, Google’s own Search Console data and the client’s GA4 property tell the same story: more terms ranking, ranking higher, earning more of the clicks they were shown for — and far more of those visitors doing something once they arrived.

Sessions

42,163
+546.5%

Clicks from Google

18,764
+221.2%

Search impressions

248,617
+263.3%

Engagement events

158,742
+2240%

×6.5

Sessions grew 6.5× and tracked engagement 23× — in 6 months

Six months in, Tilson draws 42,163 sessions from 33,617 users, against 6,521 sessions from 6,842 users at the start — 35,642 additional sessions from Texans researching floor plans, build costs, financing and build-on-your-land timelines. New users climbed from 5,973 to 28,941, so the growth is genuinely new audience rather than the same visitors returning more often. Engagement events rose from 6,784 to 158,742 as a rebuilt measurement layer captured the brochure downloads, plan favourites, call and text taps and seminar registrations that precede a signed build contract.
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLEBEFOREAFTERCHANGE
Clicks 5,84218,764+221.2%
Impressions68,425248,617+263.3%
New users 5,97328,941+384.5%
Total users 6,84233,617+391.1%
Sessions 6,521 42,163+546.5%
Event count 6,784158,742+2,240.3%

Search Console — clicks & impressions

Organic traffic

Ranking keywords

920 high-intent NYC keywords at position #1
KEYWORDSVOLUMEBEFOREAFTER
custom home builder18100NA#1
home builders near me18100NA#1
home construction companies5400NA#1
single family home builders1900NA#1
new construction home builders1300NA#1
texas home builders880NA#1

Key Results

Successfully ranked #1 on Google

Rank #1

6 months1 category where a single ranking can be worth an entire build

Custom home building isn't a same-day purchase like a repair call — it's a decision measured in months, made by people who start with questions about land, cost and financing long before they start comparing builders. SEO in this category is won by being present through all of it.

Full-funnel, not bottom-funnel -
We rank for the research questions that start the journey, then route those readers to plans, model homes and design centre visits.

Location depth - Metro and county build-area pages, Map Pack optimisation, citations and reviews — the layer that makes a statewide builder findable in every market it actually serves.

Plan pages treated as products - Consolidated variants, clean canonicals, structured data and internal linking, so the floor plan library earns rankings instead of diluting them.

Measured monthly - Search Console and GA4 reviewed every month, with events configured so the numbers reflect real buying intent — not just pageviews.

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