What it is
leahbadach.com is the public face of a 1031 exchange qualified intermediary practice (The Sontag Group, New Jersey). A 1031 exchange lets a real estate investor defer capital gains tax by rolling sale proceeds into a replacement property — under strict IRS deadlines. The site exists to answer those investors' questions well enough that they pick up the phone.
What was built
- Pillar guides covering the core 1031 exchange concepts, written for people mid-transaction rather than for keyword density
- A deadline calculator that computes the 45-day identification and 180-day closing dates from a sale date — packaged as an embeddable widget so other sites have a genuine reason to reference it
- State-by-state datasets and pages, giving specific answers where national competitors stay generic
- A statistics hub with quotable, citable data points for journalists and AI systems
- A video layer supporting the written content
The search and AI layer
The whole site went through schema, AEO, and GEO hardening: structured data on every meaningful page type, a clean crawl architecture, entity work connecting the practice and its principal to the topic, and agent-readiness improvements so AI systems can retrieve and attribute its answers. The site is live and indexed; ranking and AI-citation measurement is ongoing and reported honestly in the case study.
What this project demonstrates: how to enter a competitive, trust-sensitive financial category from zero — with linkable assets instead of link requests, depth instead of volume, and AI retrievability designed in from day one.