Real Estate IDX Site That Doubled Its Search Visibility

The Solution

I rebuilt the site on Astro SSR, server-rendered from a Node process, with a Rapattoni MLS/IDX integration that pulls live listings into native property search and listing pages. Visitors browse current inventory on therealtygrouponline.com instead of being sent off-site. Local SEO is built into the structure: every market Teresa serves gets its own geographic area page with Schema.org structured data, so search engines get clear relevance signals for "realtor lynchburg", "huddleston va", and the lake communities, rather than asking one homepage to carry everything. The hero video is tuned to the LCP standard, where a high-priority poster image is the Largest Contentful Paint element and the video lazy-loads after, holding a Lighthouse score of 100 without giving up the visual.

1,265 Buyer Clicks for $1,338, at $1.06 Each

Alongside the organic work, we run a deliberately narrow Google Ads campaign: not "realtor near me", not every town in Central Virginia, but people looking for waterfront property on Smith Mountain Lake.

Over the last 60 days that campaign spent $1,338.26 and returned 1,265 clicks at $1.06 each, read from the Google Ads API. It recorded 6 tracked enquiries, which is $223 per enquiry on property running from the mid-six figures upward. That number is ours, end to end, and it is the one we stand behind.

Separately, Teresa reports seven new lakefront buyer clients over the same window, the largest of them on a home above $1 million. We are not going to turn her seven into a cost-per-client figure. The site earns heavily on organic search as well as ads, we have no access to her CRM, and dividing our spend by her clients would invent an attribution nobody measured. The budget went from $25 a day to $45 because she asked for it after seeing the enquiries, which is the only endorsement that counts.

The interesting part is who is clicking. North Carolina is the second largest source of paid clicks, behind Virginia and ahead of every other state, and the pattern repeats in organic: the site ranks 1.7 for "lake gaston vs smith mountain lake" and 1.4 for "lake norman vs smith mountain lake". Those are the two lakes a North Carolina buyer already knows. Somebody weighing their local water against Virginia's finds this site at the top of the comparison. Out-of-state demand for this lake is real and measurable, and it is where a second-home buyer comes from.

16 Meta Leads, No Deals Closed Yet

We added a Meta lead form campaign alongside the Google Ads work. The current version, TRG - SML Lead Form - US, was rebuilt on a USD ad account to avoid the 19% IVA that Meta adds to Colombia-registered accounts. Read directly from the Meta Ads API on 2026-09-12, it has spent $27.23 and recorded 12 leads at $2.27 each, three days into delivery.

Teresa's own count across both the earlier COP-currency trial and the current campaign is 16 leads in under a month. The gap is a tracking gap, not a phantom number: the earlier trial ran on the personal Colombia-registered ad account, optimizing against a pixel Lead event that never fired, so Meta's own reporting shows zero leads there even though real contacts reached Teresa. We are not going to round that up to a cost-per-lead figure for the untracked four, the same way we would not invent one for her seven Google-side buyer clients.

None of the 16 has closed as a deal yet. That is expected this early. We will report a close rate once one exists rather than guessing at it now.

Update, October 2026

Figures below come from Google Search Console, pulled October 9, 2026, with windows ending October 7, 2026. They sit alongside the figures above, which were read in August.