How Merit Homes Built Eastside Visibility in a Year

Sabrina Wilkins, Marketing Manager at Merit Homes, on building Eastside visibility with Integrity.

Merit Homes never had a visibility problem you could see from the street. Decades of Northwest contemporary builds around Kirkland, signage on the right lots, a name local realtors knew without looking it up. On the ground, Merit was everywhere.

Online was quieter. And in 2022, quiet started to cost something.

A new seat, and a case to make

When Sabrina Wilkins joined Merit as marketing manager in 2022, the role itself was new. She came from bigger regional builders, so she knew the full range of what a marketing department could run, and she knew one person could not run all of it well.

"I can allot this many hours to one or the other," she told her leadership team, "but I think we need both." Hiring outside help was not the default assumption. Marketing manager was a new position, and the reasonable question from the top was: is that not what we hired you to do? So Sabrina made the case, ran a real process, and brought finalists back to her leadership team.

Most agencies pitched the same thing: a big, full-stack package they would install end to end. That was not the need. "We are 70% there," Sabrina says. "We need somebody to really fill in the gap, that 30%."

Two audiences, and one of them did not know it existed

Kirkland was shifting under her. Rates were lifting off their 2.5% lows, inventory was about to loosen, and the city had quietly become one of the country's top launchpads for tech startups. A wave of buyers was arriving from out of state who had never seen a Merit sign on a Lake Washington lot.

"We cannot just rely on our history," Sabrina says. "We needed to make sure the new people moving here knew who we were."

That was the brand-awareness side. Underneath it sat a harder problem. Merit does not only build homes, it acquires land directly from sellers, often a younger generation managing a parent's property after a move or a death. Most of those sellers have no idea that selling straight to a builder is even an option. They do not search "builder." They search "how to sell a home without an agent," or they look up remodelers, chasing the wrong answer to their own question.

Sabrina has a name for the fix: contextual marketing. "How do we intercept people in the middle of their customer journey, where they think their journey is a remodeling case? It is not. We could find them as they are searching for remodelers, but come up as the solution."

So Merit needed to show up in two conversations at once, brand awareness on the homes side and product awareness on the land side, and neither was happening at the level the company needed.

Why local actually won it

Four things put Integrity ahead of the field, and the first was the one that sounds like a cliche until you build in this market.

They were local. Not "Pacific Northwest" local, actually local, now literally upstairs from Merit's office. When South Rose Hill versus North Rose Hill versus the Highlands changes the buyer at the zip-code level, proximity is not trivia. It is a requirement.

They already worked with home builders. Real estate and construction fluency meant Sabrina was not teaching the industry while she was buying the work.

They offered a tailored package. Where others tried to bundle the whole stack, Integrity met Merit at 70% and filled the 30%. "We are here to be a sounding board. We can focus on exactly what you need from us."

They acted like an extension of the team. "They were prepared, they were on time, and they remembered the specific pain points I was dealing with. It is like having a good friend."

The work

Sabrina kept the visible surface, website, social, email, agent outreach, out-of-home. Integrity took the technical layer she did not have time to learn deeply: keyword strategy, search advertising, backlinking, and the analytic baseline Merit had never had.

It opened with a full audit, what Merit ranked for, what it did not, where the gaps and the ceilings were. Sabrina took that straight to leadership as the company's operating picture. From there the work ran on three tracks:

• Domain Authority through backlinks. Steady, compounding, reported monthly. The underlying signal that decides whether you are even eligible to compete for the high-intent searches.
• Dual-track search ads. Google Ads aimed at buyers hunting new construction in Kirkland and at landowners circling the wrong vocabulary. The land side was the harder problem, and the contextual approach is what cracked it.
• Content built around a blind spot. The quiet win was a piece Merit did not know it needed: a plain-English explainer on what "Northwest contemporary" actually means. That post is still one of the top-viewed pages on Merit's site, still pulling relocation buyers in every month.

When a Q1 2026 anchor-text issue surfaced on the backlink side, Integrity caught it and shipped a clean fix before it could drag the program. "I really needed them to own that for me, and take direction as needed."

The new reality

The numbers tell the structural story. In twelve months, March 2025 to March 2026, Merit's Domain Authority climbed from 12 to 43, a 258% year-over-year lift. That puts Merit dead center in the Eastside custom-builder peer set: Burnstead 49, MN Custom 45, Merit 44, MainVue 43. Three years ago that comparison was not on the same axis.

Average Google Search Console position moved 23 places, from 36 (page four, invisible) to 13 (top of page two, in the conversation). And U.S. conversions grew 64% year over year, 287 to 470, on fewer total sessions. That last detail is the tell: better traffic, not just more of it.

Inside Merit, it shows up in HubSpot. "Our most engaged people were coming from organic search or paid on Google Ads. We could see that really quickly." Merit now ranks for terms that a local builder was not supposed to touch, the ones the aggregators and national builders own. "It is almost impossible to rank for those, but people were finding us through it."

What Sabrina would tell another builder

The Merit story is not a rescue. Merit was never on the ropes. What changed is that the company stopped leaning on its history and started building for the next decade of buyers, most of whom will never see a sign.

Asked what she would tell a builder in another market, her answer is about positioning, not tactics. "You are still selling a dream. Do not pigeonhole yourself and say this tech buyer in their 30s is my dream buyer. That is the face of it, but you are really solving friction points in someone's life, problems they cannot always put a word to themselves."

And on choosing who to build it with: "Find people that remember very specific things about you and your product and the nuances. That is what makes them stand out. It is like having a good friend."

Want results like Merit's? Start with a conversation.