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Six cents a click

I claimed the green building search term early and cheap, and kept claiming it for years.

Green building was hardly a search term when Tellus opened. Almost no one competed for the phrase, and little yet showed it mattered.

I chose to own the category while it was early and cheap. The term cost about six cents a click when I bought it, and for more than a decade I kept working toward page one for 'design build Los Angeles' instead of handing marketing to someone else.

Being early to a category pays only if you also do the plain work of staking out the digital shelf space before it turns expensive. A builder who knows the trade and runs the marketing himself can outpace a firm that outsources either part.

Homeowners do not search contractor names. They search a category and a city. Everything therefore aimed at one phrase, and our writing covered the category and not our firm. Tellus was also a set of licensed companies, each needing its own name and license on display. We ran a linked site for each licensed company, with Tellus as the hub. The one-domain rule fits a single brand, and we were more than one.

For years Tellus sat on page one for its core phrase, sometimes in the top spot. Being the only nationally marketed green builder helped bring the Discovery Channel's Greensburg, Kansas rebuild work to us.

Owning a category early costs little. Proving it out loud and in public over years is what almost nobody does, and it is what pays off. I handled this myself when hardly anyone in construction thought a digital presence mattered, and that habit of moving before the market catches up recurs throughout my career.

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