Hey Guys and Gals!
Today we are doing something a little bit different for this episode of the CarrotCast, we decided to do a 45-minute business teardown where we hop on with an agent or investor and unlock the biggest pain points in their business, so you can get a behind the scenes look at the journey of someone just like you and find out what it takes to get on the fast-track to success.
We sat down with Robert Grand, owner of Grand Realty and Eugene House Buyers to take a look at his business and his websites and how they could be improved. I do 3-4 of these calls each week, but have never recorded one until today!
We touched on some exciting topics including easy tips for content creation, creating a follow-up system, and restructuring deals to better capitalize on leads. Listen in as we breakdown Roberts’s business and discover ways to help him and his team find massive success, thus creating a major community impact in 2020.
Read the Full Show Notes Below…
Carrot, Fix my Business! Behind The Scenes Strategy Session w/ Real Estate Investor & Agent, Robert Grand
If you are an investor or an agent, you will want to do all you can to maximize your marketing efforts. With a few small tweaks and additions to your site, you will be able to create credibility and gain traction in your SEO efforts.
Robert Grand is a former firefighter who has been a real estate agent since 2012. Together with his partner, he runs a traditional real estate agency, a property management company, and does investments. Robert has two sites with us, one for Grand Realty and another for Eugene Housebuyers. We did a quick rundown of each, providing some tips to really make the site stand out and grab the attention of potential clients.
Eugene House Buyers
Eugene House buyers is set-up with the Hemlock theme. I always advise Carrot Clients to do a quick google search of words they want to rank for and take a look at any of the Carrot sites that pop up. In order to stand out, you’ll want to do something a little different with your theme, content, and message.
The site looks good and has a great local picture. The CTA stands out and matches with the company’s branding. Your call to action should always stand out, being one of the first things people see when visiting your site.
The content doesn’t appear to be updated from our stock content, which is ok, but it may not be so great for SEO. I always advise clients to go in there and tweak a few things to make it more personal. Ideally, 100% of the content should be different, however, just by editing 30-50%, Google will recognize it as unique content.
Updating the About page is extremely important. It provides a connection between you and your potential clients. You’ll want to make it personal, showing who you are and what you do. And of course, you should have a few pictures! On the realty side, Robert has a great about page, I suggested he grab some of that content and bring it over to the investor side.
Follow-up is another issue we addressed. If someone wasn’t interested in the cash offer, they were just letting the lead go instead of referring them over to the realty side. If you offer both services, be sure to provide dual offers and options for your clients! Robert left about $100k on the table last year just because the wasn’t passing the leads to the reality side.
Testimonials are great for your website but there are a few things you can do to make them even better. First off, if possible use full names as opposed to just initials. Try to include a photo with yourself and the client or better yet, get a video testimonial. If you aren’t able to achieve either, take a pic of the house, even a screenshot from Google maps will do if you aren’t able to drive-by.
For both sites, I advised Robert to get his Facebook retargeting set-up. I consider this another form of follow-up as you will be able to keep hitting those potential clients with new content every day.
Video, video, video. You hear me talk about this a lot, but including a video, with your face, will help you to get more leads and close more deals. Talk about what you can offer, who you can help, and why you’re doing what you are doing.
Grand Realty
Until signing up with Carrot, Grand Realty didn’t have a website. Their business did pretty well simply from word of mouth – they closed 45 transactions the first year. After getting the sites set-up, they didn’t do much with them for the first 4-5 months.
The first thing we talked about was knowing where the leads were coming from. In the “Campaigns” section, you can enter your information and find out! For this situation, we wanted to know how many people were coming to the site via the Eugene House Buyers site. This will let Robert know if people are actually clicking the link he has up.
If you are working with buyers and sellers as a real estate agent, why not set up landing pages for both? So many of our agents only create city-specific landing pages for homebuyers, without anything targeting home sellers. Since Robert focuses more on listings, I advised him to get some pages up there to attract home sellers in his market area. The more you niche these pages into seller specific situations, the easier it will be to get them to rank.
A question Robert had about his site was if he should market as Eugene or Eugene and Springfield, and which way would be better for SEO. If you search Google for real estate in Eugene and you see results or related searches for Springfield, you’ll know that Google looks at them as one and the same.
Since we did find Springfield results, and since his pages are ranking well, leaving them as Eugene and Springfield is the way to go. I do recommend that Robert create separate landing pages for each city. Adding in some great backlinks can help to bump up these pages even higher.
If you are creating lots of pages for your site, you don’t need to have them all in the primary menu. For example, Zillow will rank #1 for everything and they have millions of pages, but you don’t see links to all of them on their homepage. It’s once you search within Zillow, and you see all of the subpages and related searches that those other pages come into play. You can set up your site in the same way.
Immediate Action Steps
By doing just a few small things, Robert will be able to maximize the value of the sites he has with us. Here is what we have advised him to do…
- Amp up the about pages
- Implement Facebook retargeting
- Utilizing our Campaigns feature to know where leads are coming from
- Update stock content
- Create better follow up and offer multiple solutions to clients
- Create landing pages for sellers on the reality side
- Add credibility to testimonials using photos or even video
By taking these few simple steps, Robert and his team will be able to reach more people, build credibility, and begin to establish themselves as the authority when it comes to real estate and in the Eugene area.
Making An Impact
A couple of years ago Robert shifted the way he did business. He, along with Ryan Fletcher created the Impact Club in the Eugene area as a way to give back. One of the initial projects gave $10k to The Clarity Water Project and to date they have been able to donate over $94k back into the local community. For Robert, it is all about building those finances so he can have the greatest impact on his community as possible.