Green building barely existed as a search term when Tellus opened. Almost no competition for the phrase, but also almost no proof it mattered yet.
I decided to own the category early and cheap, bought the search term while it cost about six cents a click, and kept pushing for page-one placement on 'design build Los Angeles' for over a decade instead of treating marketing as somebody else's job.
Being early to a category's only worth something if you also do the unglamorous work of claiming the digital shelf space before it gets expensive. A builder who understands the trade and also does the marketing himself can move faster than a firm that outsources either one.
Homeowners don't search for contractor names. They search the category and the city. So everything pointed at one phrase, and we wrote about the category, not the firm. Tellus was also several licensed companies, each needing its own name and license shown, so we ran one linked site per licensed company with Tellus as the hub. The one-domain rule is written for a single brand, and we weren't one.
Tellus held page one, and at times the top result, for its core search phrase for years, and being the only nationally marketed green builder is part of how the Discovery Channel's Greensburg, Kansas rebuild work found the firm.
Owning a category early is cheap. Proving it out loud, in public, for years, that's the part almost nobody does, and it's the part that actually pays off.
I chose to do this myself instead of delegating it, at a time when almost nobody in construction thought of digital presence as core to the business. That instinct, act early on something the market hasn't caught up to yet, shows up again and again across my career.