Check out these “homes for sale” Google search results from May 2026.
The real estate website at #1 is only 2.5 years old.
It doesn’t have a massive team or budget.
And it outranks three of the most powerful real estate platforms on the internet: Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com.
This is the full story of how we built it — and what it means if you’re a real estate agent trying to get found online.
Quick Website Stats
Before I walk through the strategy, here’s what LBI Locals has achieved since launching on September 16, 2023:
- 109,000 website visitors in the 2025 calendar year
- 46,000 visitors in just the first five months of 2026
- #1 on Google for “LBI homes for sale” — above Zillow and Realtor.com
- 107 search terms where the site appears in Google’s top 3 results
- 435 total search terms where it appears on Google at all
- Zero dollars spent on advertising
Who Is This Case Study About?
The Guarino Team are Long Beach Island real estate specialists based in New Jersey.
LBI — as locals call it — is an 18-mile barrier island on the Jersey Shore. Think classic summer town. Families who come back every season. Vacation homes that trade hands within tight-knit communities. Local restaurants, beach tags, boat rentals, and a pace of life that people drive hours to find.
It’s the kind of market where reputation is everything. Where being the local expert isn’t a marketing angle — it’s a requirement.
That context shaped every decision I made when we built their site.
Don’t Build a Real Estate Website
I know that sounds counterintuitive.
The most effective real estate website in some markets isn’t a real estate website per se. It’s a resource. A local guide. The first place someone turns when they want to know anything about your area.
Think of it like a local magazine that happens to have a real estate section — rather than a real estate brochure that happens to have a blog.
That shift in thinking led to LBI Locals.
Want to know what kind of content to build for your own market? I cover the full breakdown in our real estate blogging ideas guide.
What We Actually Built
We launched LBI Locals on September 16, 2023.
The homepage doesn’t open with real estate listings.
It opens with stunning video and a question: “What brings you to LBI?”
Four paths: Things to do. Where to eat. Plan your trip. Real estate.
Real estate is one of four options. Not the headline. That’s intentional.
The Content Architecture
Every piece of content on LBI Locals is built to answer a question that real people are typing into Google.
Here’s a breakdown of what that looks like in terms of traffic.
Click for full screen.
Dining Guides
“Top 5 Hidden Gem Restaurants on LBI” is the highest-traffic page on the site — 822 visitors in a single month, up 333 from the month before. People searching for restaurants in Beach Haven aren’t looking to buy a house. But they’re meeting the Guarino Team’s brand for the first time.
Hotel and Accommodation Directories
The LBI Hotel Guide, pet-friendly hotel lists, boutique accommodation roundups. Visitors planning trips search for places to stay. LBI Locals shows up. Each visitor is a future buyer getting a first impression.
Practical Travel Content
“NYC to LBI Bus Guide.” “LBI Beach Access Guide.” “Boating on LBI: Rentals, Charters, and Cruises.” These are the questions tourists and second-home buyers ask before they ever think about real estate.
The Weekend Rundown
Right on the homepage, LBI Locals runs a “What’s Happening This Weekend” section — a live roundup of events, concerts, and things to do on the island that week. This isn’t a static blog post. It’s a reason to come back every single Friday. Locals and summer regulars bookmark it. They share it. They start their weekend planning there. That kind of repeat visitation tells Google something important: real people find this website genuinely useful.
The Community Poll
Also on the homepage — a “What brings you to LBI?” poll. Simple. Interactive. It invites visitors to self-identify before they’ve read a single word of content. Are you a day-tripper? A summer renter? Thinking about buying? That one question does two things: it personalizes the experience, and it tells the Guarino Team exactly who’s visiting. Most real estate websites never learn anything about the people who land on them. This one does.
Community Events and Contests
A summer scavenger hunt with over $10,000 in prizes. A “Best of LBI 2026” community voting contest. A full summer concert schedule. These aren’t marketing gimmicks. They’re the reason people follow the brand on social, open the emails, and come back to the site again and again. Engagement at that level builds an audience. An audience builds a business.
Local Business Spotlights
Short-form YouTube videos highlighting local businesses — the coffee shop, the ice cream parlor, the chowder house. Each one is a piece of content that gets shared by the business owner, their staff, and their regulars. That’s organic reach the Guarino Team didn’t have to pay for. And every video lives on the website, adding another reason for Google to see LBI Locals as the authoritative voice on Long Beach Island life.
99% Hyperlocal Traffic
The beauty of this strategy is that all of your incoming traffic is hyperlocal.
That means no wasted resources on building website content for people that can never become a client.
Real Estate Content
Homes for sale. Neighborhood guides by town. Market insights from the Guarino Team. But it earns its place alongside everything else rather than leading the conversation.
This is the hyperlocal content model I describe in detail in our real estate SEO services overview. Build a website people want to visit. Google will take care of the rest.
The Results
Let’s get into the numbers.
The Growth Curve
This is what explosive organic SEO growth looks like.
From launch in September 2023 through most of 2024, traffic was modest. That’s normal. Google takes time to trust a new website — typically six to twelve months before organic traffic meaningfully picks up. It’s called the sandbox period.
Then summer 2025 hit. And the traffic exploded.
109,000 Visitors in 2025
In the full calendar year of 2025 — roughly 15 to 27 months after launch — LBI Locals attracted 109,000 active users.
Almost every one of them arrived through organic search. Not paid ads. Not boosted social posts. Google sending people directly to the site because the content answered their questions better than the competition.
The peak week hit approximately 10,000 to 11,000 visitors in a single seven-day stretch.
For an 18-mile island. For a real estate team. That’s remarkable.
2026 Is Already Bigger
We’re not through spring.
By May 28, 2026 — before the island’s peak summer season — LBI Locals had already reached 46,000 active users for the year.
The May 2026 traffic spike is already approaching the peaks we saw mid-summer in 2025.
Summer 2026 is shaping up to significantly outpace last year.
107 Search Terms in Google’s Top 3 Results
I know the image below is long.
But it’s only a fraction of the keywords that rank #1 on Google.
SEO — getting Google to recommend your website to people searching for things — is ultimately a numbers game.
The number that matters most isn’t how many keywords you rank for. It’s how many you rank for at the top.
When you appear in positions 1, 2, or 3 on Google, you get clicked. Below that, you mostly get ignored.
LBI Locals currently ranks in Google’s top 3 positions for 107 different search terms. These range from transactional real estate searches to dining guides to travel planning queries.
That’s 107 different entry points into the Guarino Team’s brand. All free. All compounding over time.
#1 for “LBI Homes for Sale” — Above Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com
This is the result that matters most for a real estate audience.
Zillow launched in 2006. It’s spent two decades and hundreds of millions of dollars convincing Google it’s the most trustworthy real estate resource on the internet.
LBI Locals launched in September 2023.
When someone in New Jersey — or anywhere — types “LBI homes for sale” into Google, the first result they see is the Guarino Team’s website. Zillow is second.
That’s not a fluke. That’s what happens when a website genuinely serves its local audience better than a national aggregator does.
A Note on Leads
I want to be straight with you here.
The Guarino Team will tell you the leads are coming in. Calls. Emails. Form submissions. People who say they found them through Google. That’s all real.
What they don’t have is a formal lead tracking system that ties every inquiry back to its exact source. Most busy real estate teams don’t. They’re closing deals, not running attribution spreadsheets.
What I can verify is this: Over 150,000 people found the Guarino Team’s website in the last 16 months without a single dollar of paid advertising.
How many of them needed a realtor? You do the math.
What About AI Leads?
There’s a new channel that barely existed in real estate marketing three years ago.
AI search.
More and more people are skipping Google entirely. They’re opening ChatGPT, Grok, or Perplexity and asking things like:
“What are the best restaurants on Long Beach Island?”
“Who are the best realtors on LBI?”
“Is Long Beach Island a good place to buy a vacation home?”
LBI Locals is already showing up in those answers.
Most importantly, they sometimes show up for the best lead-driving queries.
The data below is from Ahrefs, but the data collection service is still being developed. These numbers are smaller than the reality.
- Grok recommends LBI Locals content 14 times — up 10 citations in the last month alone
- ChatGPT cites it 6 times
- Microsoft Copilot cites it 5 times
- Google’s AI Overviews cite it 4 times
- Perplexity cites it 2 times
When an AI assistant recommends your website as a source, that’s called an AI citation. Think of it like being recommended by the smartest assistant in the room — one that millions of people trust to make decisions every day.
The vast majority of real estate websites have zero AI citations.
LBI Locals has 31 and growing.
This isn’t luck. It’s the direct result of building content that AI systems recognize as genuinely authoritative and locally relevant. The same content strategy that earns Google rankings earns AI citations — when done right.
I cover the full approach to AI visibility for real estate agents here. It’s becoming one of the most important channels we build for clients right now.
Schedule a Meeting
Let’s chat about how an SEO-focused website that YOU OWN, Google Business Profile Campaigns, or Custom Email Campaigns can generate high-quality leads and exceptional long-term ROI. If my services aren’t the best move for you, I’ll gladly point you in the right direction
What Would This Look Like in Your Market?
That’s the real question.
You’ve seen what 32 months of strategic content building did for a real estate team on an 18-mile island in New Jersey. Starting from zero. No ads. No shortcuts.
The question isn’t whether it works.
The question is whether you’re ready to build something that compounds over time — instead of renting leads from Zillow month after month, paying for traffic you’ll never own.
If you want to talk through what this looks like for your specific market, I’m happy to have that conversation.
Not sure where you stand with AI search yet? I’ll audit your brand’s current visibility across ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity for free. You’ll see exactly how you appear — or don’t appear — when buyers ask AI assistants for agent recommendations in your market.
