Ranking is not the same as being found

Findings from our own network, October 2026

Last month we said we would publish the same comparison again, so here it is first. The pattern held. Across the site, our average position improved from 44.9 to 32.2 over October, the third consecutive month of improvement. Bee Cave went from 36.7 to 30.6, Mueller from 51.7 to 43.6. Pages continue to climb for weeks after they are published, and our total impressions continue to fall while clicks rise, which is what a settling page looks like.

But sorting the same data a different way showed us something we had not been looking for.

Thirty-three pages rank well and are almost never seen

We split every neighborhood page on the network by two things: where it ranks, and how often Google actually showed it in October.

	Pages	Times shown
Ranks in the top twenty, shown 10+ times	5	97
Ranks in the top twenty, shown fewer than 10 times	33	118
Ranks below twenty, shown 10+ times	8	292

Thirty-three pages sit in the top twenty results and were shown 118 times between them across a whole month. One of them ranks at position 1.8 and was shown nine times. Another sits at position 4.0 and was shown three.

Meanwhile the eight pages that rank worst, between position 20 and 54, carry more than twice the visibility of all thirty-three combined.

Ranking well and being found are different things, and we had been measuring the first one.

What makes the difference is the name

One of our neighborhood pages went from being shown 10 times in September to 113 times in October, moving from position 46 to 20. It has one video on it. The name is The Village at Castle Pines, a named community in Castle Rock, Colorado.

Elsewhere on the network, pages carrying eight and twelve videos moved far less over the same period, despite having far more content on them.

The difference is not effort and we no longer think it is video count. It is whether people type that neighborhood’s name into Google, and whether anything else is already answering when they do.

Some neighborhood names are search terms. Named communities and subdivisions, districts that buyers and locals both call by name, places someone would type when researching a neighborhood. Other names are not searched at all, or are searched but already answered by something else entirely, such as rental and travel listings for a district that is better known as a destination than as a place to buy a home.

The question worth asking before you film

Would a buyer type this neighborhood’s name into Google?

If yes, the page has something to work with, even with one video on it. If no, the page can reach the top of the results and still go unseen, which is the most common outcome we see.

That question is harder than it sounds, because the neighborhoods agents know best are often the ones only locals name.

What this doesn’t tell you

We can see which pages were shown and where they ranked. We cannot see why any individual page moved, and October was a month when almost everything on the site improved, so we cannot cleanly separate one page’s gain from the general lift.

The numbers are also small. One hundred and thirteen appearances in a month is a real change from ten, but it is not traffic yet, and a network this size can be moved by a handful of searches either way.

And this is a snapshot of one month on one network of neighborhood pages. It is enough to change where we point our own attention. It is not enough to be a rule.

We will run the same split again next month and say whether it holds.