The situation
Nobody hired me. A contractor doing search work for builders cold-called Tellus in late 2013; I wrote the plan myself and took an advisory seat with equity in his agency, Contractor Gorilla, with Tellus as its client.
Tellus: real press, no search position, one of hundreds of Los Angeles general contractors a homeowner could not tell apart. The agency: a method for contractors and no operator advising it.
Page one for 'design build Los Angeles' before the category filled; a web of Tellus entity sites, each ranking and linking the others; and a habit of presence kept up on top of running construction.
Write the strategy in-house, hand the agency the build, take an advisory seat with equity instead of a vendor contract, and split the presence across the Tellus companies rather than one site.
Tellus Design and Build sat on page one of Google for 'design build Los Angeles' for years, at times the first result, and the LA Clippers found us that way. The agency's own case study reports 319 percent organic traffic growth and top positions for 25-plus keywords; its figures, under its name.
Read on
The decision and the reasoning
Why we did it this way, told first.
ReadWhat we did and what it produced
The work, decision by decision, and the result.
ReadA slice of the project list
A few related projects.
ReadPrivate side
The full report, the source files on record, the timeline and every figure with its source. Password.
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