Every day, motivated sellers in your area search online for someone to buy their house. They visit websites, compare options, and choose who to call. But they’re not always calling you.
It comes down to three critical factors:
- Sellers don’t know your website exists
- If they find your website, you haven’t convinced them you’re trustworthy
- They want to contact you, but technical issues make it too clunky
These three factors break down into 4 specific, fixable problems that most real estate investors face. Let’s see what they are and exactly how to fix each issue.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Most sellers start with a Google search—your site needs to rank locally for “sell my house fast [your city]” to be in the running.
- Visitors won’t convert if your site is confusing or overwhelming. Simplify your forms and make your CTAs pop.
- Trust is built through third-party validation—use testimonials, real photos, Google reviews, and recognizable affiliations.
- A clunky user experience or poor mobile usability and site reliability can quietly wreck your lead flow. Test your site often and prioritize page speed.
Table of Contents
- Your Website Isn’t Showing Up in Google
- Your Website Isn’t Built to Convert Visitors
- Your Website Doesn’t Build Trust
- Your Website Has Technical Issues
- What You Should Do Next
1. Your Website isn’t Set Up to be Found on Top in Search Results
When someone in your area needs to sell their house fast, what do they do? They don’t flip through the Yellow Pages or look on social media platforms for a buyer.
They grab their phone and Google something like “sell my house fast Chicago” or “sell my house for cash.” If your website doesn’t show up in those search results, you won’t get this lead.
You can test this yourself — search for the terms you’d want to rank for in your area and see where your website appears. The further down you are, the fewer leads you’re getting.
Some of the common reasons why you’re not ranking on top in Google searches (aka not SEO-friendly) are:
- Your website doesn’t use the words people actually search for – you say “real estate solutions” but sellers search “sell my house fast”
- You’re not creating helpful content that answers seller questions like “how to sell a house quickly” or “what do cash buyers look for”
- Your site doesn’t clearly mention your city or the specific neighborhoods you serve
For example, this website says they’ll buy your house in America without mentioning any specific city or region.
No one likely searches “sell my house America” unless they’re living overseas and want to sell a U.S. property.
Even then, they’d probably search for their specific state or city, like “sell my house fast in New York” or “sell house quickly in Miami.”
How to Fix Your Website’s SEO Issues
Update your website content to include these keywords naturally. Your homepage should clearly state “We buy houses for cash in [your city]” instead of vague phrases like “comprehensive real estate solutions.”
For example, let’s look at the top result we get when we search for ‘sell my house fast san antonio’
It’s this one…
To find the right keywords you can use Carrot’s Keyword Explorer. It shows you the exact phrases people type into Google when they need to sell fast, plus how competitive each keyword is in your market.
Even if you use the right keywords, technical issues on your website can still impact your SEO. Things like slow page loading, broken links, or pages that don’t work properly on mobile phones will signal to Google not to prioritize your website.
That’s where Carrot’s SEO Site Audit tool can help.
It scans your entire website and identifies technical problems that could be dragging down your search rankings.
SEO isn’t a one-time fix. Regularly publish helpful content, monitor your keyword rankings, and keep optimizing based on what’s working in your market.
2. Your Website isn’t Designed for Conversion
You might have hundreds of people visiting your website each month, but if they’re leaving without contacting you, you have a conversion problem.
Conversion is getting visitors to take the action you want – whether that’s filling out a contact form, calling your phone number, or requesting a cash offer.
Here are some of the biggest conversion killers sabotaging your website:
(Keep reading, but if you want to dive deep into site conversion, check out this podcast.)
Your forms are asking for too much information
When visitors see a long form, they get overwhelmed and abandon it. Research by Hubspot analyzing over 40,000 landing pages reveals that 3-field forms convert at 25%, while 10-field forms drop to just 13%.
Here is an example of how not to create a form — too many steps make people overthink and abandon the form:
Ask only the essentials: name, phone number/email, and property address (optional). You can gather additional details like timeline, property condition, and motivation during your phone call (or using the Autonomous Lead Manager).
Here’s a form on a Carrot site that converts visitors to leads at a high rate:
Your call-to-action buttons are invisible or confusing
Your button should be the most prominent element on the page – use contrasting colors and specific language that tells visitors exactly what they’ll get.
Notice the call-to-action (CTA) in the form image above.
- The bright orange “Get My Fair Cash Offer” button jumps off the page compared to the other colors, making it impossible to miss.
- The copy is benefit-driven and specific – instead of generic text like “Submit,” it tells visitors exactly what they’ll get: their cash offer.
At Carrot, we tested changing button text from “Click to Continue” to “Get My Fair Cash Offer” and saw conversions jump 49.5%.
Important elements are buried on your page
Don’t fall into the trap of making your website look beautiful at the cost of conversions. Your goal isn’t to get a “wow” when someone visits your site – it’s to get their contact information.
This Forster Jones page looks sleek and sophisticated, but the tiny “Contact Us” link is buried in the top corner and easy to miss.
Compare that to this investor’s homepage that prioritizes conversion over aesthetics (one of the highest converting sites in all of Carrot):
This page has:
- A prominent headline that immediately tells visitors what they’ll get.
- The contact form is clearly visible. It’s a simple 3-field form that people won’t hesitate to fill out.
- The blue “Get My Cash Offer Now” button dominates the page and can’t be missed.
- Multiple contact options. The phone number is visible with “Call Us.”
- Trust signals like recognizable publications they’ve been featured in are visible under the form.
- Clear benefit statements — “Sell as-is | Any condition | No repairs | No cleaning | No agent fees” — address the main seller concerns upfront.
We might suggest they test a different button color so it pops out even more. They could push their conversion rates even higher!
3. Your Website Lacks Trust Signals That Convince Visitors You’re Legitimate
People don’t trust businesses saying good things about themselves.
Instead, they look for validation from others who’ve been in their exact same shoes – past customers who needed to sell their house. When they see logos from authority websites, professional organizations, or credible third-party platforms on your site, trust builds naturally because these entities have nothing to gain by vouching for you.
You need trust elements on your website to show people that you can be trusted to do business with.
Some of the key trust signals are:
- Real testimonials with photos: Not just “Great service! – J.K.,” but detailed stories with full names and pictures. Carrot found that sites with testimonials saw a 123% increase in leads compared to sites without them.
Check out this video to learn how to ask specific questions that’ll get a house seller to give you a raving review that busts objections.
- Your photo and company information: People want to see who they’re dealing with. A photo of you or your team and a personalized “About Us” page shows you’re real folks.
- Google reviews and ratings: Display your Google star rating prominently.
- Authority website logos and credentials: BBB accreditation, professional association memberships, industry certifications, or “As Seen On” logos from reputable news outlets all build instant credibility.
4. Your Website has Technical Problems
There’s nothing more frustrating than a motivated seller trying to contact you but giving up because your site doesn’t work properly.
Does your website work properly on mobile?
With over 93% of mobile searches happening on Google and most people searching for house buyers on their phones, a website that doesn’t work on mobile is essentially invisible.
Check if your site has these mobile killers:
- You can scroll side-to-side, and the screen doesn’t adjust to phone size
- Text becomes so small it’s unreadable on mobile
- Buttons are too small to tap with a normal-sized thumb
- Contact forms don’t work properly on phones or are hard to fill out
Switch to a mobile-friendly real estate website design like Carrot to fix these issues once and for all.
Are your forms working correctly?
Another common technical issue is: Broken forms.
A broken form doesn’t just mean it shows an error or won’t accept information. Sometimes forms appear to work perfectly but are actually failing in hidden ways:
- The form submits, but visitors never see a “thank you” or confirmation message, so they assume it didn’t work and either try submitting again or give up entirely
- You’re receiving the leads, but they’re going to your spam folder, so you never follow up
- The form works on computers but crashes on mobile phones
Forms that don’t submit properly, error messages that don’t explain what went wrong, or confirmation pages that don’t load will frustrate sellers into calling your competitors instead.
Here’s an example of a form that shows a clear error:
Test your contact form monthly by submitting it yourself. Make sure you see a clear confirmation message after submitting. Connect your forms to a CRM and add SMS alerts so you know immediately when someone contacts you.
Is your website loading as fast as possible?
If everything else is working correctly, check how fast your page loads. A 10-second load time might not seem like much, but when people are online searching for someone to buy their house and they have dozens of options, they won’t wait around.
Google has found that bounce rates increase by 32% when page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. For real estate investors, this means every extra second your website takes to load is literally sending motivated sellers to your competitors.
Our websites are built specifically to load fast, rank high in search results, and convert visitors into leads.. That’s why you’ll consistently find Carrot sites loading noticeably faster than the industry standard.
You can test your website speed at Google PageSpeed Insights. (And check out a few more tips on page speed from our help center.)
The test below was done on Josh & Tiffany High’s Carrot website using Google PageSpeed Insights. Check out the score!
If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, make sure your website is built with clean code from the ground up, your server is fast, and your images are in the proper size and format. We have all of that baked into our Carrot real estate websites.
What Should You Do Next?
These four issues are costing real estate investors thousands of dollars in lost deals every month. The good news is they’re all fixable.
You can tackle them one by one, or you can use a platform like Carrot that’s designed specifically for real estate investors.
Every Carrot website comes with the conversion elements we’ve discussed already built in: mobile-optimized design, fast loading speeds, strategic contact forms, easy-to-add trust signals, and SEO optimization.
Carrot websites generate 2.5 times higher profits per lead compared to other platforms. Members have generated over 1 million motivated seller leads, and Carrot sites hold 45% of the top search rankings in most U.S. markets.
Check out a demo of Carrot today and see why thousands of investors choose it over building their own websites from scratch.