Two counties, twenty miles apart, moving in opposite directions.
| Residential units authorized | Dallas County | Collin County |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 21,698 | 14,137 |
| 2021 | 18,799 | 17,140 |
| 2023 | 13,285 | 19,580 |
| 2025 | 12,691 | 19,082 |
Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, series BPPRIV048113 and BPPRIV048085.
Collin County has authorized more housing than Dallas County every year since 2022, and in 2025 it authorized 50% more. Dallas County permits are down 41.5% from where they were a decade ago.
If your marketing is built to catch new construction, the new construction moved north and your website didn't.
What stayed behind is bigger than what left
Dallas County's median home was built in 1982, and 29.8% of its housing predates 1970 — 45.9% predates 1980. In Collin County, 4.2% predates 1970.
That's the whole story. Collin and Denton are new-build markets. Dallas County is a repair-and-replacement market, and it's a large one — over a million housing units, nearly half of them more than forty-five years old.
Forty-five-year-old housing in this soil generates a specific list: sewer line replacement, slab leak detection and repair, re-pipes, panel upgrades on service that was sized for a 1980 house, HVAC changeouts on systems well past design life, and foundation work.
Those are searched by name, by homeowners, at the moment something fails. Almost none of them have a page written for them by a Dallas company, because Dallas companies spent the last decade marketing to builders.
The soil is a marketing fact here, not just a construction one
Dallas County sits on the Blackland Prairie. Houston Black clay — the Texas state soil — covers roughly 1.5 million acres running from north of Dallas down toward San Antonio, and the USDA describes these soils as shrinking and swelling markedly with moisture, noting their "very high shrink-swell potential" as a limitation on building sites.
Practically: foundations move, and when foundations move, supply lines under slabs fail. A slab leak is not a plumbing accident in Dallas County — it's a predictable consequence of the ground.
That matters for your pages because it means the homeowner searching "slab leak repair" is not searching an obscure term. They're searching a condition their neighbors have had. Content that explains why it happens here converts better than content that treats it as a surprise.
And then there's hail
Tarrant County ranks second in Texas for severe hail days since 2000, at 126. Texas recorded 878 major hail events in 2024, following a record 1,123 in 2023, according to IBHS using National Weather Service data.
For roofing and exterior trades this is the whole calendar, and it arrives without notice — which means the pages have to be aged and ranking before the storm rather than published after it.
Where we'd actually compete
Not "Dallas SEO." That term is held by agencies headquartered here with large city-page programs already built. We'd be joining a queue and telling you it was a strategy.
Service plus sub-market. Dallas County's inner ring is where the old housing is, and the competitive field there is much thinner than at the metro level. Garland has nearly 250,000 people and, as of our August 2026 check, no locally-based agency defending the search results. Richardson, Mesquite and the older parts of northeast Dallas are the same shape.
That's slower than the head term and it's the ground that's actually open.
$500 to start, then no monthly fee until we hit the page-one target we agree on.
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of pages we build rank on Google's first page
location pages built for a single client across 7 states
page-one placements for one client across 5 cities
growth in monthly search impressions for a Nashville client
Limitless Doors
Commercial automatic doors, five Alberta metros
- 63+ page-one placements across 5 cities
- 85%+ of 74 pages on page one
- 4,483 clicks in 12 months
PM2
MRO inventory and storeroom optimization, Orlando and Tampa
- 589 to 1,300 monthly organic visitors
- 85%+ of pages on page one within 90 days
- First inbound leads in the company's history
Haus of Sovereign
Somatic and spiritual wellness, Nashville
- 132 to 2,900 monthly impressions
- 1,903 organic clicks in 6 months
- 15.6% average click-through rate
We also built and ranked a 208-page location program for a security and surveillance company across 15 metros in 7 states, with 85%+ of pages reaching page one. That client has asked not to be named.
FAQs — Dallas
Should we chase the growth into Collin County instead?
If you actually work up there, yes, on its own pages — Frisco, McKinney, Plano are separate searches. But be aware Collin is a new-construction market with builder relationships that search doesn't reach, and the suburbs have their own defended agencies. The old-stock work in Dallas County is less glamorous and less contested.
Is "Dallas SEO" really off the table?
For a newer domain, yes. Two agencies headquartered in this metro run substantial city-page programs and directories take several of the remaining slots. We'd rather win Garland than come nineteenth in Dallas.
How much of the slab leak angle is real?
The soil science is documented and the consequence is well known to anyone who works here. What we can't tell you is how many people search it monthly — no volume tool was used for this page, and we won't invent a figure.
We do commercial. Does the old-stock argument apply?
Differently. Commercial buildings in the same soil have the same foundation and under-slab problems, but that work comes through facility managers and vendor lists rather than search. The website's job there is credibility, not lead generation.
$500 to start. No monthly fees until we hit the page-one target we agree on.
The $500 one-time setup fee covers page research, page development and the website build. Monthly billing only starts once we hit the page-one target we agree on before any work begins. If we never hit it, you never pay a monthly fee — and we keep working.