Real estate in Blue Ridge, Georgia and Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Thomas Echea needed to be found by buyers in two markets, and his site was barely visible to either Google or the AI engines people now search through. From April to June 2026 I audited the gaps and built the technical SEO, schema and AI-crawler foundation his site now runs on.

From September I took on a second role: paid-ads lead generation for new listings, building a repeatable launch system and letting real creative-test data decide where budget went instead of guessing.

The foundation carried monthly Google clicks up 12x between June and August 2026. The ad program is generating leads at $23.91 blended cost per lead, against the account's own ~$32 average, as of October 2026.

Thomas Echea is a Compass real estate agent working two state markets: Blue Ridge, Georgia, a mountain resort market, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a southern metro market. He closes most of the business himself; a small office team handles calls and day-to-day coordination.

His buyers and sellers range from second-home and retirement buyers in Blue Ridge to luxury listings in Fort Lauderdale, plus a smaller base of builders and referring agents he wants to reach directly.

I joined the account in April 2026 as part of a small outside marketing team, reporting to the team's account lead. A teammate built the website theme and ran social and video production; I owned the technical SEO/AEO layer from April to June, then paid-ads lead generation from September.

Where it started

1. A real business with no marketing infrastructure

   Thomas was already closing eight figures a year in volume with a multi-agent team, but ran on an all-in-one website platform with no owned CRM, no analytics, and leads that funneled through one person's personal phone with no shared visibility.

2. A deadline he didn't choose

   That platform's subscription had an end date, which forced the whole site and its MLS data feed to move within months rather than on the team's own schedule.

3. Blocked from the engines buyers now use

   The April audit found all 8 major AI crawlers blocked from key pages, no schema at all, and an AI visibility score of 14 out of 100, on top of the SEO gaps.

4. An industry with its own rulebook

   State real-estate regulators control what the team can call itself and what has to appear on every single post, which constrained even simple naming and branding decisions.

I handled 2 services for Thomas Echea. Each one below follows the same path: the problem, the solution, how I built it and when, the results, and what I took from it.