OCS://lab_results_001

1 Percent Lists: Zero to National

A Covington brokerage with no listings, no brand, and a business model the industry laughed at — engineered into a real estate franchise operating across 24 states. We built their first website before listing #1. We’re still in the lab with them today.

10+

Years & counting

60+

Franchise offices

States

Digital partner, the whole way

Key_Takeaways

What This Engagement Demonstrates

How long has One Click SEO managed enterprise search for 1 Percent Lists?

One Click SEO has managed enterprise search for 1 Percent Lists for over 10 years, scaling organic visibility across 60+ franchise offices in 24 states — from a single Covington brokerage with no listings to one of America’s fastest-growing real estate franchise networks, recognized by Inc. 5000 in 2020.

What search architecture powers each 1 Percent Lists franchise site?

Each franchise site runs on a shared technical backbone with its own local entity: RealEstateAgency and LocalBusiness schema with per-office geo-coordinates, service-area structured data, crawlable IDX integration, and breadcrumb architecture — giving new owners search structure from day one instead of starting from zero.

What publicly verifiable results document the 1PL partnership?

1 Percent Lists earned Inc. 5000 recognition in 2020, the Inc. fastest-growing veteran-owned list in 2022, and national Inman coverage in January 2024 following the NAR settlement — while doubling annual sales volume every year from launch and growing to 60+ offices across 24 states as of 2026.

“Franchise SEO isn’t national SEO at scale — it’s sixty local campaigns that share a backbone. The architecture has to let each franchise own its market, while the brand maintains the authority that makes each of those local campaigns credible.”
— Dean Cacioppo, Founder, One Click SEO · 25 years in search

The_Brief_2015

The Brief: Sell a Model the Industry Hated

In late 2015, Grant and Kelly Clayton opened a brokerage in Covington, Louisiana with a premise traditional real estate considered heresy: full-service listings for a 1% fee — professional photography included — instead of the customary cut. They had conviction, a Northshore address, and zero listings. What they didn’t have was any way for a home seller in St. Tammany Parish to discover that a brokerage like theirs existed.

That was the assignment: make a brand-new discount brokerage findable by the exact people searching for a better way to sell — before the company had a single closed transaction to point at. No ad budget could carry that long-term. It had to be search.

Experiment_Log

The Experiment Log: A Decade in Five Phases

Phase 01 · 2015–2016 · Covington, LA

The first website, before listing #1

We built 1 Percent Lists’ first website and handled their digital marketing from day one — before the brokerage had a single closed transaction to point at. Alongside the site came the Northshore local SEO foundation: a clean brokerage entity, Google Business Profile engineering, citation architecture across St. Tammany, and content built around the question their future clients were already typing — does a 1% commission realtor actually exist, and what’s the catch? Answering that question honestly, in search, on a site built for exactly that job, was the entire early growth engine for a company nobody had heard of.

Phase 02 · 2016–2020 · The Gulf South

Compounding through the skepticism

The model worked — by the Claytons’ own account, the brokerage doubled its sales volume every year from launch. As the single office grew into a team, the engagement grew with it: we helped structure the business to bring on agents, upgraded the website and its technology stack as the brand matured, and layered in the broader digital marketing a growing brokerage needed — with SEO at the center. The search footprint expanded right alongside: market-by-market visibility, a deepening content moat around the commission-savings math, and the review velocity that turns early clients into the proof the next client searches for. In 2020, Inc. 5000 named 1 Percent Lists one of the fastest-growing companies in America.

Phase 03 · 2020–2021 · Franchise launch

Building the franchise brand, not just its search

When franchising launched in fall 2020, we worked directly with Grant and Kelly Clayton through the buildout of the franchise brand itself — process, technology, branding, and marketing for 1 Percent Lists the franchise company, not just search engineering for the original brokerage. We built every new franchise website from the ground up, and paired the search foundation with Google Ads and Local SEO for each office as it opened. On the search side, the question changed shape: how does a brand built on local trust replicate that trust in markets it’s never operated in? The answer was architectural — each franchise gets its own domain and its own local entity, engineered on a shared technical backbone, so a new owner in Louisville or Denver starts with structure instead of starting from zero the way Covington had to. 24 franchises opened by the end of 2021.

Phase 04 · 2022–2024 · National footprint

The industry catches up to the thesis

By 2022, Inc. recognized the company again — among the fastest-growing veteran-owned businesses in the nation. Then the industry’s commission lawsuits and the NAR settlement landed, and the model the establishment had dismissed suddenly looked prophetic: Inman profiled 1 Percent Lists in January 2024 as the franchise that might be immune to the upheaval. A decade of compounding search equity meant that when the country started googling its commission options, 1 Percent Lists was already holding the answers.

Phase 05 · 2025–2026 · Network rebuild

New websites — corporate and every franchise

The latest deployment: a ground-up rebuild of the corporate site and the entire franchise site network. Every office now runs on engineering most national brokerages don’t have on their flagship: RealEstateAgency + LocalBusiness schema with per-office geo-coordinates, service-area structured data, breadcrumb architecture, IDX integration, and a performance layer tuned for Core Web Vitals. Sixty-plus local sites, each one a correctly-weighted local entity in its own market — the same real estate entity engineering we run for single-market clients, multiplied across a national franchise map.

The_Stack

What Runs Under It

Entity & schema engineering — knowledge-graph structured data for the brand, every office, and every market: the layer that now also feeds AI search visibility.
Local SEO, per market — GBP, citations, and review architecture executed franchise by franchise, because “national SEO” for a franchise is really sixty local campaigns that share a backbone.
Paid search, per franchise — Google Ads layered on top of the local SEO foundation as each office opened, giving new owners visibility from day one instead of waiting on organic to build.
Content strategy — a decade of answering the commission question better than anyone else in search.
Web engineering — every franchise site plus the new corporate + franchise platform: crawlable IDX, structured data, page-speed discipline.

Honest_Results

Where Are the Cherry-Picked Percentages?

Not here. Agency case studies love a “+847% traffic” chart with no baseline, no timeframe, and no way to check it. We’d rather show you the numbers that are public and the one metric that can’t be faked: the same client, for over ten years, through every stage from zero listings to a national franchise — and they just trusted us with their entire network’s rebuild. Nobody retains an SEO partner for a decade out of politeness.

The public record tells the growth story on its own: doubled annual sales volume by the founders’ account, Inc. 5000 recognition in 2020, the veteran-owned fastest-growing list in 2022, national press in 2024, and 60+ offices across 24 states as of mid-2026 — for a company that started with one office in Covington and a model the industry said couldn’t work.

Engage_Protocol // four ways to work with us

Working with us is straightforward.

Pick the engagement that fits where you are right now — every path starts with honest data.

📅 Free · 30 min

Next_Step // select a protocol

Ready to put this to work?

Every engagement starts with an honest look at your current position. Pick where you want to begin.