La Tierra Realty: Rebuilding a Land Company's Acquisition Engine

What I Built

• 60+ live pages: 24 property listing pages, hubs for available, commercial and past projects, a 30-project sold portfolio, About, Contact, resources with 3 downloadable buyer guides, and a blog.
• Full English and Spanish. Every page switches language in place with a toggle or ?lang=es, so Spanish-speaking buyers get the whole site, not a translated homepage.
• Find-your-lot tools: a property quiz, filters by region (Central, North, East Texas), sorting by price and acreage, and an interactive map of every property.
• Conversion paths on every page: a "Text Us" button, a call-back pop-up, newsletter capture, and an owner-financing payment calculator on each listing.
• Live lot availability. Listing pages read the sales team's Monday.com board and hide lots marked under contract or sold, refreshed every 10 minutes, so ads never send buyers to a lot that is gone.
• Compliance pieces: TREC brokerage notices and the financing partner's NMLS disclosure.

Migration

The old Wix sitemap had 123 URLs. I mapped every one to its new home with 103 permanent 301 redirects, plus clean URLs without .html. Sold and retired properties redirect to the past-projects portfolio instead of returning a 404, so links and search equity carry over.

Performance

• All 175 images converted to WebP with descriptive, keyword-based file names.
• The homepage hero is preloaded with high fetch priority and served at the right size per screen through Netlify's image CDN (480px to 2000px), and below-the-fold images lazy-load.
• Images cache for a year as immutable assets, logos for a week.

Structured Data and Indexing

• Schema on every page type: RealEstateAgent / LocalBusiness on the homepage, Product with offers on each property, Article, Organization and FAQPage on every blog post, plus breadcrumbs and collection pages.
• Canonical tags, an XML sitemap (58 URLs and growing with each post), and robots rules that keep paid landing pages and draft content out of the index.

Capture

• The site stores the Google click ID (gclid, wbraid, gbraid) and all UTM parameters for 90 days, along with the properties each visitor viewed, and attaches them to every form.
• A consistent data layer fires events for leads, paid leads, quiz steps, the call-back pop-up and the Text Us button.

GTM and GA4

• Set up the Google Tag Manager container: GA4, the conversion linker, GA4 lead and paid-lead events, and the Google Ads lead conversion with enhanced-conversion user data.
• Registered 6 GA4 custom dimensions (keyword, campaign, lead type, form location, page language, property) and marked the lead events as key events, so reports split by language, property and keyword.

Server-Side Conversions

During launch, one buyer's browser blocked the Google tag. The lead reached the CRM, but Google Ads never saw it. I moved conversion reporting to the server: each paid lead's click ID is written to a Google Sheet that Google Ads Data Manager imports daily as "Lead Created (CRM)". I also created a higher-value "Qualified Lead (CRM)" conversion fed from CRM stage changes, so bidding can move toward leads the sales team qualifies.

Structure

• 4 core Search campaigns split by language (English, Spanish) and device (desktop, mobile), so budgets and bids reflect how differently each audience behaves.
• 68 ad groups in exact and phrase pairs across 136 keywords. Every exact keyword is also an exact-match negative in its phrase ad group, so each search is answered by the most specific ad.
• 198 shared negative keywords (155 English, 43 Spanish), targeting limited to 23 Texas counties, and search partners, display and AI Max turned off.
• Sitelinks in English and Spanish, logo and property images, and a tracking template that passes keyword, match type, device and ad group to every landing page.
• Built in bulk with CSV uploads, then tuned live: CPC caps by device, budget shifted toward the campaigns producing leads, and North Texas and Brenham keyword sets added.

Property and Market Tests

• Pecan Peak Ranch: two dedicated campaigns for a single development near Granbury, geo-targeted to DFW and the surrounding counties, with the overlapping Granbury terms paused in the general campaigns.
• Eagle Ranch, San Antonio: a mobile test with 48 exact keywords across 12 cities from northeast San Antonio to Seguin, and its own landing page. It got a 10.7% click-through rate and 0 leads in 7 days, so I recommended pausing it and moving the budget to the campaigns that convert.

What the Data Said

• Spanish mobile was the best campaign: 14.81% CTR, $0.78 CPC, about $10 per lead, the highest share of leads the sales team reached, and the source of the first contract.
• The first two days ran at $11 per lead (6 leads, 10.8% CTR), against $166 per lead in the two weeks before.
• Spanish desktop reached the $200 test threshold with no active prospects, so I recommended pausing it and moving the budget to mobile.

What I Built

• 7 dedicated pages: owner-financed land, land near Austin, near Fort Worth, near Brenham, a Spanish-language page written in Spanish from the start (not translated), and pages for two individual developments.
• About 150 pre-written headlines matched to the search keyword. A search for "owner financed land near me" lands on "Owner-Financed Land Near You". Only approved copy is shown; nothing from the URL is printed on the page.
• A region layer re-sorts the property cards and changes the subhead and button for North Texas, Central Texas and Brazos Valley searches.
• No navigation exits, kept out of search results, and a sticky call bar on mobile.

Form Design

The first version asked for name and phone, then made everything else optional. 18 of the first 44 leads had no email, which cut off follow-up. I rebuilt all seven forms into three steps: name and phone (the lead is saved right away), then a required email, then optional property and timing. After the change, every new landing-page lead arrived with an email except one person who left at step two.

Lead Routing

• A serverless function creates the Monday.com item and fills in source, language, contact details, the property of interest (matched against a whitelist of 24 property labels), and notes.
• Added paid-attribution columns to the sales board: campaign, keyword, click ID, click date and the landing page the lead converted on. The sales team can see on each record exactly which search produced the lead.
• Lead Source fills itself (Google Ads, Meta Ads, guide download or website), so the board stopped defaulting everything to "Website Inquiry".
• Follow-up form steps add the email, property and timing to the same record as a note, so a lead is never split into duplicates.

Spam and Bot Filtering

Built a server-side lead filter with seven checks (origin, user agent and country, a hidden honeypot field, submit time under 3 seconds, fake names, spam text, repeat bursts). Clean leads go through, suspicious ones are flagged for the team and kept out of Google Ads conversion data, and obvious bots are dropped. There is no captcha, so real buyers face no extra friction.

What It Shows

• Spend and results by campaign from Google Ads, reconciled against the CRM so tracking gaps show up right away.
• For every lead: was it called, was anyone reached, is the buyer still active, was a showing set, did it go to contract. Then the same breakdown by campaign and by keyword theme.
• A short summary at the top with the decisions it supports: which campaigns to pause, where to move budget, which leads need a call today.

Insights It Surfaced

• Keyword intent beat volume. Owner-financing and named-area searches brought 18 leads and 6 of the 12 live prospects. A broad statewide term also brought 18 leads, but only 1 live prospect.
• Follow-up became the bottleneck. 99% of leads were called, but 48% were reached. Separating "No answer" from "Contacted" in the CRM became a recommendation.
• Inventory gaps. 13 reached buyers wanted areas with no current inventory, which pointed to where new properties would sell.

Strategy

• A keyword workbook: a 197-keyword master list, a page strategy map, location pages, a Spanish keyword set, a content calendar and 90-day priorities.
• The second batch of 20 topics was chosen with real Keyword Planner volumes (for example "homestead exemption texas" at 12,100 monthly searches) and covers financing, land prices, buying guides and where-to-buy pages.

Built for Search and AI Answers

• Every post is in English with a full Spanish version and carries Article, Organization and FAQ schema.
• Each post had to pass an automated quality check before publishing: a direct 40–60 word answer up top, question-style subheads with short answers, at least 8 sourced statistics, quotes, a comparison table, 4–6 FAQs, and internal links that point only to live pages.
• Content was drafted in parallel with AI writing agents and checked against the same rubric, which shortened a 20-post batch to two days.

Search Console

Each new post goes into the sitemap and gets an indexing request in Google Search Console when it is published, so it reaches Google's priority crawl queue. Search Console showed 674 organic clicks from mid-August to early October and 49 pages indexed. One guide, on putting a mobile home on land, was flagged for a sharp jump in impressions.

What I Built

• Confirmed the client's existing monday campaigns plan could run it and worked out the plan limits: automated workflows require Enterprise, so the drip is scheduled by date on the current plan.
• Wrote and designed 5 emails over 6 weeks for a list of 86 agents: an introduction, what tracts qualify, local projects as proof, how a sale works for the agent's client, and a short personal last touch.
• Delivered a build guide that maps each email block by block to the monday campaigns editor, with copy-ready text, brand colors, images and a send schedule.

What I Ran

• Built the original Wix website with live available-property listings and refreshed the branding.
• Launched and ran their social media: strategy, execution and content.
• Ran Meta ads that drove 300 leads on $10K of spend.
• Designed property videos and managed Monday.com email workflows.