Category: Small Business Marketing

On December 17, 2025, Texas Instruments started production at SM1, the first of the new chip fabs on its Sherman site, three and a half years after breaking ground in May 2022. TI plans up to four connected fabs there and expects as many as 3,000 direct jobs, plus thousands more at the companies around it. If you fix, clean, cool, mow or spray things for a living, that’s the Texas Instruments Texoma service business opportunity in one sentence: more people, more houses, more calls.

We’re a little tired of the word “boom,” and a lot of what gets written about it is hype. But the arithmetic here is real, and it’s local. People who take those jobs need somewhere to live, and every one of those houses needs an AC tech, a plumber, a pest guy and somebody to mow the yard.

Where the Texas Instruments opportunity reaches your service business

Start with the people who just moved here. They don’t know anybody. They have no plumber, no electrician, no neighbor to ask. They find you the same way everyone new to a town does: a phone, a search box, and whatever shows up first.

Then there’s the building itself. New subdivisions need everything installed and then maintained. Construction crews on long jobs need services too, and they stay for months. Existing homeowners tend to fix up and upgrade when the area around them is getting busier.

And it isn’t a single wave. A site with room for four fabs gets built out over years, so demand keeps coming in pieces instead of all at once. That’s good news for a small business that can’t hire ten people in a quarter.

The competition is coming too

You aren’t the only one who has noticed. Expect companies based down US-75 in Collin County and Dallas to keep stretching their service areas north. Franchises look at the same growth numbers you do. And some of the local outfits that coasted on word of mouth for twenty years are finally putting money into their marketing.

Our opinion: the businesses that come out ahead over the next few years won’t necessarily be the biggest or the cheapest. They’ll be the ones a new resident finds first and trusts fastest. A company from McKinney with a sharp Google profile will beat a better local company that’s invisible online, at least until the local one fixes it.

Four things to get right this year

1. Your Google Business Profile

For most service searches, the map results show up before any website does, and they come from Google Business Profiles. Fill in every field, pick the most specific categories, set your service area to the towns you actually drive to, add real photos, and post something at least every couple of weeks. If you’d rather hand it off, that’s what our Google Business Profile management covers.

2. A website that shows up in more than one town

Newcomers are landing all over the region, from Sherman and Denison to Van Alstyne, Howe and Pottsboro. A lot of businesses rank fine in their home town and disappear two exits down the highway. Usually the fix is a real page for each town you serve, with your actual work there, and a site that loads fast on a phone. We walked through it in why you rank in Sherman but not Denison.

3. Reviews, on purpose

A new resident has nothing to go on but your star rating and what strangers wrote about you. Ask every customer for a Google review with a direct link, and answer every review you get. It’s the cheapest marketing on this list and the one owners skip most.

4. Answer the phone, and know where calls come from

More visibility means more inquiries, and it means nothing if half of them go to voicemail and never get a call back. People with a broken water heater call the next name on the list. Our post on why whoever answers first wins the job goes deeper on that.

Keep a simple lead log while you’re at it, even a spreadsheet: date, name, what they needed, how they found you, whether you booked it. After three months you’ll know which of the other three things is paying off.

What we’d do if we owned a service company here

We’d do the free stuff first. The Google Business Profile and a review routine cost nothing but time, and they’re where a new resident’s search starts. Then we’d fix the website, especially the service-area pages. Ads come last, once the profile and site are good enough that the clicks we pay for actually turn into calls.

SM1 is already running, and TI’s own plans leave room for three more fabs on the same site. Whatever the pace of the rest of it, the people are already arriving, and they’re searching for someone to call.

Sunset View RV Resort is a few minutes from Lake Texoma in Kingston, Oklahoma. It has a pool, a pickleball court, a stocked fishing pond, a dog park and monthly sites, and it’s a short drive from several casinos. In other words, a good park that deserved more guests than it was getting from search. The owners handed us their website and search in October 2025. This RV resort digital marketing case study covers what we changed and what happened through the first half of 2026.

The short version: booking revenue for January through June 2026 doubled compared with the same months of 2025.

Where the resort started

Plenty of guests found Sunset View the old-fashioned way. They drove past it, or somebody at the lake mentioned it. That works fine in July.

It works a lot less in January. The weekend crowd thins out and a lake park lives on people who plan ahead: snowbirds, monthly guests, work crews on long jobs, couples booking a casino weekend. Those guests search before they drive. When they searched, the resort didn’t show up the way a park with its amenities should have, and the old website didn’t make a strong case once they got there. It didn’t clearly say what the park offered, who it was built for, or how to book from a phone.

What we did

Nothing exotic. Most of this is the same work any local business needs. It just had to fit the way RV travelers shop, which is on a phone, comparing three or four parks, often from the cab of a truck.

A new website built around how guests book

We rebuilt the site from the ground up. Different guests get pages that answer their own questions: weekend visitors, long-term and monthly stays, and crews who need a place to park near a job site. Amenities, rules, directions and things to do nearby sit where people expect them, and booking is one tap away on any page. That’s the approach behind every website we design: figure out who is actually searching, then give each of them a page.

Local search

We rewrote titles and page copy around the searches travelers really run, like RV parks near the lake, near the casinos, and monthly RV sites in the area, and built the new site so Google could read it cleanly: fast pages, clear headings, one topic per page. This is the slow, unglamorous part of local SEO. It’s also the part that compounds.

Google Business Profile and reviews

For a campground, the map listing does a lot of the selling before anyone reaches the website. People see the photos, the star rating and the most recent reviews, and a lot of them decide right there. We cleaned up the resort’s Google Business Profile: categories, amenities, hours, current photos and regular posts. We also set up a routine for asking guests for reviews and answering the ones that come in, good or bad.

If you want to do the profile work yourself, our guide to optimizing a Google Business Profile in 2026 walks through it field by field.

The results

Search moved first. Clicks from Google search grew 2.6x over January through June 2026, and the resort now shows up in Google more than 40,000 times a month. Those are people looking for a place to stay around Lake Texoma and seeing Sunset View in the results.

Revenue is the number the owners care about, and it followed. Booking revenue for January through June 2026 was double what the same six months brought in during 2025. Those months include the slowest stretch of the year for a lake park, the same stretch where drive-by traffic used to dry up.

What an RV resort digital marketing case study can and can’t tell you

We’d be suspicious of any agency that took credit for every dollar of a doubling. Rates change. Weather changes. One rainy spring can wreck a season for everybody on the lake. What we can say is that far more people found the resort on Google, they landed on a site that made booking easy, and revenue rose over the same months.

When you read any agency’s case study, ours included, check when the work started, what the comparison period is, and whether the results are the ones the owner would actually put on a bank deposit slip. Rankings for a handful of hand-picked keywords are nice. Revenue against the same months last year is better.

What carries over to other seasonal businesses

If you run anything seasonal around Lake Texoma, like a marina, a boat rental, cabins, an event venue or a guide service, the slow months are where marketing earns its keep. Summer customers find you anyway. Off-season customers plan, and planners search.

• Give each type of off-season customer its own page. A monthly guest and a weekend guest ask completely different questions.
• Keep your Google Business Profile current all year, with hours and photos that match the season.
• Ask for reviews during your busy months, so the profile still looks active when things are quiet.
• Watch search clicks and calls month over month. You’ll see which months need a push before the bank balance tells you.

None of that requires a big budget. It does require somebody to keep doing it after the first month, which is usually where seasonal businesses fall off.

This is one of our earliest web design and SEO projects, for a local service company in the Sherman area that we’re keeping unnamed. We rebuilt their website around what their customers actually search for, and in less than a year they went from buried to Google’s local top three across the city. Their 2021 revenue more than doubled what it had been before they started working with us.

Where they started

Their problem is still the most common one we see. Before we worked together, you couldn’t find this company by searching for what they did. You could find them by searching their name, and that was about it.

A search that includes your business name is a branded search. Those look great in a report because they convert well, but the people doing them already know you from a neighbor or from seeing your truck around town. Branded searches don’t bring in anyone new. The customers a growing business needs are the ones typing the service and the town into Google, who have never heard of you and are about to call whoever shows up first.

Their site wasn’t built for those searches. It didn’t use the words customers used, and it didn’t give Google much reason to show it to anyone who wasn’t already looking for it by name.

The screenshot below is a rank grid. Each circle is a spot on the map around Sherman, and the number is where the company showed up in the local pack (the three businesses listed with the map) for a target search made from that spot. Green is top three. Orange is fourth through ninth. Red is tenth or worse. In April 2021 they were top three close to their own location and to the west. Across most of Sherman they were somewhere between ninth and past 21st, which for a local search means invisible.

Web design and SEO done as one job

We started with keyword research: what people in their service area typed when they needed this kind of work, and which of those searches had real volume. Then the site and its pages were built around those searches, so each one had a page that answered it.

The target was the local pack. For a service business that’s the most valuable spot on the results page, because it’s where people tap to call. If the local pack is new to you, our SEO primer for small businesses explains how it works.

We get asked a lot whether a business needs web design or SEO. In our experience the split is the problem. A good-looking site that doesn’t target any searches is a brochure nobody picks up. A keyword-stuffed site that’s confusing on a phone gets the click and loses the call. You need the design and the search work planned together, from the first page.

The results

By January 2022, less than a year after the April 2021 screenshot, the same grid looked like this:

First, second or third at every point on the map. That covers the neighborhoods where they’d been ranking 13th and 21st the spring before.

Rankings only matter if the phone rings, and it did. The company’s 2021 revenue more than doubled what it had been before they started with us. Marketing wasn’t the only reason. They did good work and answered the phone. But being findable by strangers was the missing piece, and it’s the piece we built.

What we’d add if we started this project today

The core of this project still holds up: rank for what customers search, in the places they search from. But local search in 2026 isn’t the same as it was in 2021, and a few things would be on the list from day one.

The Google Business Profile gets as much attention as the site

Back then, the website did most of the lifting. Now the Business Profile is often the first thing a customer sees, and sometimes the only thing. They see you in the map results, read a few reviews, and tap call without ever opening your site. Categories, services, photos and hours all feed that listing, so we’d set it up carefully and keep it current. Our Google Business Profile work is its own service for that reason.

Reviews are part of the plan from month one

Your review count, your rating and how recently people left reviews all show up right next to your name in the map results. Customers compare them before they call. We’d set up a simple, consistent way to ask every happy customer, starting in the first month instead of waiting until rankings improve. A text with a direct review link, sent the same day the job wraps, works better than any card left on the counter.

AI answers sit on top of the results

ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews now answer a lot of “who should I call” questions directly. Those tools lean on sites and listings that say plainly what a business does and where it works. A site organized around specific services and towns, which is what this one was, has a head start. We’d also make sure the business name, address and phone number match everywhere those tools look.

It’s all on a phone

Most people searching for a local service are on a phone, often in a hurry, sometimes standing in a wet kitchen. A tap-to-call button, a page that loads fast on cell data and a contact form you can fill out with one thumb matter more than how the homepage looks on a desktop monitor. We’d design for the phone first and check the desktop second.

Knowing which searches pay

We’d track the source of every call and form fill from the start, even if that just means asking each new customer how they found you and writing it in a notebook. Once you know which searches and pages bring in paying work, you know where the next dollar goes. You also find out which pages aren’t pulling their weight, which is just as useful when it’s time to add to the site.

Try the test we’d run first

Pick up your phone, open a private browser window, and search for your main service and your town without your business name. Then drive to the other side of town and search again.

If you’re not in the map results either time, you’re about where this company was in April 2021.

SEO for small business comes down to one goal: showing up when someone searches for what you do, not who you are. If you own John Doe’s Plumbing, the people who already know your name will find you either way. The customers you’re missing are typing “plumber near me” or “water heater repair Sherman” and picking from whoever Google puts in front of them.

That part hasn’t changed since we first wrote this post in 2022. A lot around it has. Most local searches happen on a phone now, Google stacks a map and often an AI-written summary above the regular results, and more people ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation instead of scrolling at all. There are more places to show up, and they don’t all reward the same work.

Where a local search actually sends people

Search “pest control Sherman TX” on your phone and look at what comes before the first normal website link. Usually it’s a few sponsored results, sometimes an AI Overview, then a map with three businesses listed under it, and only then the organic results. Each of those is its own contest. A small business can’t win all of them at once, and it doesn’t need to.

The Google local pack

The local pack is that map and the three businesses under it. For a plumber, a salon, a dentist or anyone who serves a specific area, it’s the most valuable spot in search, because it’s where people call from. The phone number is right there on the listing.

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your Business Profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how established you look online: your reviews and rating, links to your site, mentions around the web.

You can’t move your shop, so distance is the one factor you don’t control. It’s also why the pack looks different depending on where the searcher is standing. A business can hold the top spot in downtown Sherman and be nowhere from a kitchen table in Pottsboro.

We track this with grid-based rank tracking, which checks a client’s map position from dozens of points across their service area instead of from one address. The approach we used back in 2022 still holds: win the ground closest to the business first, then widen the circle town by town until it covers everywhere they work. If you serve both Sherman and Denison and only show up in one, we wrote up why that happens and how to fix it.

What moves the local pack, in rough order of payoff:

• A complete Google Business Profile: the right primary category, your actual services, accurate hours, real photos, and a service area that matches where you really go.
• A steady flow of reviews, with replies. Twenty reviews spread over a year looks healthier than twenty in one week and then silence.
• A website with pages that match your services and towns, so Google has something substantial to connect the profile to.
• The same business name, address and phone number everywhere you’re listed.

Organic search results

Below the map sit the regular results. For broad terms they’re much harder to crack. A national chain or a big directory will beat a local pool builder for “pool construction company” every single day. But nobody in Texoma needs to rank nationally. “Pool builder Sherman TX” or “pool construction North Texas” is a far smaller fight, and the person typing it is exactly the customer you want.

That’s most of keyword strategy for a small business: the specific service plus the specific place, with a real page for each combination that matters. A page for AC repair. A separate one for heat pump installs. A page for Denison if Denison is a big share of your work. One “Services” page with eleven bullet points gives Google almost nothing to rank.

Phones push this further. Search “Mexican food” on your phone and Google assumes you mean near where you’re standing, so you never type the town. For a lot of searches your site is competing locally whether you planned for it or not. The businesses that told Google clearly what they do and where they do it get the benefit.

What AI answers changed

Google’s AI Overviews now show up on plenty of local searches, and people ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity things like “who’s a good roofer in Denison?” Those tools pull from the same places Google does: your website, your Business Profile, your reviews, directories, local news. A thin site with eight reviews gives them nothing to say about you. It’s the focus of our AI search optimization work, and the short version is that it rewards the same basics, done more thoroughly.

That means pages that answer the questions customers actually ask (“do you service Bonham?”, “what does a termite inspection involve?”), business details that match everywhere, and reviews that describe the real job instead of just “great service.” None of that is new. There’s just less room now for a business that skipped it.

Where to start with SEO for small business

If you’re doing this yourself, go in this order:

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile. Categories, services, hours, photos, service area. It’s an afternoon, not a project.
2. Ask every happy customer for a review, and text them the link the same day while the job is fresh.
3. Make sure your website loads fast on a phone and has one page per main service.
4. Mention the towns you serve on the pages where they belong, in plain sentences. Not a footer stuffed with forty city names.
5. Open Google Search Console once a month and look at which searches you’re showing up for. It’s free, and it tells you what’s working.

If you’d rather hand it off, that’s the work our SEO team does every month for local businesses across Texoma. Either way, expect months, not weeks, before it shows in the phone log.

Most small businesses never get past step two. That’s the opening for the ones that do.