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10 Best Real Estate Websites for Agents to Generate Leads
The best real estate websites for agents offer the ability to build lead-generating consistency, financial predictability, & growth-hacking momentum for your real estate business.

We’ve seen countless Agents use websites to boost their branding and credibility, increase website traffic, and capture qualified leads.

You might be looking for a real estate website provider, or could be a current Carrot member who’s exploring ways to use the platform, I reviewed some of the best real estate agent websites, some powered by Carrot, and found 10 noteworthy trends that can increase your online lead generation.

Why?

Because starting in 2019, 9 3 % of home buyers started looking for properties by browsing the internet.

And keeping up with those massive changes can be difficult. In today’s real estate world, you don’t just need a website, you need one of the best websites.

Since all of your competition is online, just being online isn’t enough.

You need to stand apart from the hundreds of thousands of results that Google generates with any given search and you need to have a website that pulls leads and converts visitors.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Here they are…

10 Things The Best Real Estate Agent Websites Have in Common

1. Real Estate Websites with IDX

The first is simple but worth mentioning.

Real estate agent websites with IDX tend to pull in more traffic, leads, and revenue than their listing-less counterparts.

The reason is simple. If people don’t have to leave your website to view listings, they will spend more time on your domain. This means that when they find a house they love, they’ll contact you instead of the competition (because they’re on your website already).

But what exactly is IDX?

IDX is a website integration that allows visitors to browse and search for MLS-style listings on your website.

The best part, though, is that, with IDX, you don’t have to update your listings manually. IDX will do it for you automatically.

It’s low maintenance and crazy effective.

This is why we include IDX integration within Carrot’s real estate agent website design.

This is what IDX looks like in action on one of our Carrot members’ websites.

Simple and informative. Townsend Realty Group uses a real estate website designed by the Carrot team. Their website showcases the company’s well-designed logo, along with several engaging property images from the company’s catalog of listings via IDX.

With IDX, visitors can search for houses natively on your website rather than having to leave and go to Zillow or Realtor.com.

And the more time people spend on your website, getting to know you and your business, the better they’ll remember you when they’re reading to buy a house.

However, no matter how good the IDX on your real estate website, people still go to third-party listing websites at some point.

Zillow, for example, has 160 million monthly users. 50% of visitors to Zillow are planning to buy or sell a home. And there are even two million real estate professionals listed on Zillow.

You can’t compete with that.

Still, though, IDX is worth having because some people will stay on your website to browse listings.

The G Team are active agents in Roseburg, Oregon. They offer innovative solutions to address their audiences. Rather than only having bulk listings and content for their properties, the G Team has created specific pages for their niche audiences.

Here is an example of how they target North Umpqua River Homes with a specific page as well as specific content.

The G Team offers another reason that you should consider using IDX.

Namely, because it allows you to easily choose featured properties for your front page.

With IDX, you don’t just give visitors the ability to search your website for homes, you create a simple system for featuring homes that you think will sell quickly and with a high profit margin.

All you have to do is go to the pool of IDX-generated listings and select the ones you want to feature.

And as you probably know, no home sells better than a featured home.

2. High-quality Pictures And Videos

As I looked through some of the top real estate agent websites on the Internet, I couldn’t help but notice that each had stunning visuals.

Pictures like this…

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And this…

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And videos like this…

As it turns out, real estate website design and professional photography are a match made in heaven.

If you want people to buy a house, then you have to make it look good.

And one of the best ways to do that is by using remarkable videos and photos for your house listings.

In fact, according to one study, listings with professional photographs saw 139% more clicks and sold for anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 more than expected.

Really, that’s no surprise.

When a house looks beautiful, people want to buy it. Homebuyers spend 60% of their time looking at listing photos and homes with high-quality photos receive a 47% larger asking price per square foot than homes without high-quality photos.

Even if you pay a photographer $500 or $1,000 to take photos of the house, that investment is well worth it.

3. Compelling House Descriptions

Above all, you’re a salesperson.

Your job is to sell houses to people who want to buy a home in your area. And you want them to buy from you whether your relationship started offline… or online.

For that reason, the top real estate agent websites have remarkable, emotionally charged, enthralling descriptions of properties.

They don’t just put something like, “Hey. Here’s a house for sale. It’s nice. Buy it.”

Instead, they use powerful language and compelling… well, sales copy.

For the first example, I’ll use one of Carrot’s Concierge real estate website service websites, Krista Mashore and her team have built an authoritative website for home buyers and sellers in and around Brentwood, California. Her website is full of useful local content, including an informational blog and community pages for each of the areas in her market.

Krista uses a very detailed description of her properties…

(Image Source)

See how the description evokes an emotional response with words and phrases like “PRIVATE FEEL,” “low maintenance tropical landscaping,” and “NO rear neighbors”?

(Image Source)

You want to do the same thing with your descriptions. Here’s another example from the same website.

This illustrates an important point. When writing the description for a home on your website, your primary goal isn’t to give all the specs or drown people in detail.

You want to flatter them. You want them to feel as though they’ve found the best house on the market and they would be silly to pass it up.

You want them to need it.

Additionally, Bill Gassett from MaxRealEstateExposure, recommends doing this:

“When writing your listing description it is important to mention the qualities of the property that stands out over and above the competition. For example, if all the competing homes have a two car garage and yours has a three car, this is something you would want to emphasize.”

In other words, point out the good and don’t mention the bad — at least, not yet.

There will come a time when you have to mention problems with the house, but that time is not right now. First, you want people to fall in love with the property. Then, and only then, will they forgive its flaws.

Finally, if you really want to make your product description shine, consider this study by Zillow.

In the research, Zillow observed over 24,000 homes sold and found that these 15 words were within the descriptions of homes that sold for more than expected.

On the left is the word analyzed and on the right is the average percentage increase of what the home sold for (relative to what realtors expected it to sell for).
1. Luxurious — +8.2%
2. Captivating — +6.5%
3. Impeccable — +5.9%
4. Stainless — +5%
5. Basketball — +4.5%
6. Landscaped — +4.2%
7. Granite — +1% – 4%
8. Pergola — +4%
9. Remodel — + about 2%
10. Beautiful — +2.3%
11. Gentle — +2.3%
12. Spotless — +2%
13. Tile — +2%
14. Upgraded — +1.8%
15. Updated — +0.8%
When appropriate, consider tossing some of these words into your descriptions to give them a better conversion rate and a wider profit margin.

4. Easy-to-access Contact Information

It might seem like an overly simplistic element to your real estate agent website, but the trend is undeniable:

The best real estate websites for agents make it easy to contact the broker.

This element on your website is so crucial that I couldn’t avoid mentioning it.

All of the best real estate agents are doing it. Let’s take a look at the next Agent Carrot website before looking deeper into their contact call-to-action.

For the Kelly Kingston team, impact begins with their company logo: the K built into the roofline and chimney silhouette send a strong message about what they specialize in. Their area pages within the website’s main navigation menu expand on their theme by drilling down listings in their target areas of Oklahoma City, Midwest City, Bethany, Yukon, and Edmond.

Kelly Kingston Homes makes it easy for visitors to find different options to contact them from the homepage…

As well as on many of the other pages …

To G.Stiles…

(Image Source)

But lest you think that a “Contact” button isn’t actually all that important, consider some of our own heat map data from Carrot.

On our Carrot real estate investor websites, we found that the “Call Us” CTA in the corner lights up like a Christmas tree.

That’s not a huge surprise, of course.

When people find a house they love, they want to contact someone, they want to try and figure out what it would take to purchase the home.

And, frankly, they don’t want to do that part of the process online. They want to talk to a real person.

All you have to do is let them.

5. Mobile-responsive Design

Did you know that 80% of internet users own a smartphone?

How about that 61% of internet users won’t return to a website if they had trouble accessing it on their phone — and that 40% of those frustrated visitors go to a competitor’s website instead?

If you didn’t, now you do.

Clearly, mobile browsing isn’t a thing of the future, it’s a thing of right now.

This means that your website absolutely must be mobile-flexible.

The best real estate agent website templates on the internet aren’t mobile-responsive because they’re ahead of the times; they’re mobile-responsive because they’re in line with the times.

In other words, mobile-responsive is now par for the course.

If you’re not sure whether your own website is mobile responsive or not, you can use Carrot’s mobile responsive tool to find out.

Just type in the URL of your website and click “Start Test.”

On the left side, you’ll see what your website looks like on an iPhone, and on the right side, you’ll see what your website looks like on an iPad.

If it doesn’t adapt to each device, you desperately need a new website.

All of Carrot’s real estate agent and investor websites are automatically mobile-responsive.

This is important for several reasons.

It helps your rankings in Google (because Google hates ranking un-mobile-friendly websites), makes visitors more comfortable with browsing your page on their smartphone, and even increases your conversion rate — conversion rates on mobile are 64% higher than on desktop.

If your website isn’t mobile-responsive, then you need to fix it as soon as possible.

6. Have Clear CTAs

Imagine this.

Someone visits your website and browses through a few house listings. They find one they love and they want to visit the house in person because they’re considering buying it.

But there’s a problem.

They can’t figure out where to go on your website to make that happen.

It might seem like a silly and unlikely situation — but rest assured, it happens.

When real estate agents design a website with unclear navigation, people leave before they even spend thirty seconds trying to figure out where to go next.

In fact, the average human attention span has been compared to that of a goldfish.

For that reason, the best real estate agent websites guide the visitor with clear and easy-to-find CTAs.

Buttons like this…

And this…

But, you’re probably wondering, what makes those buttons so clickable?

Two things.
1. Copy clarity
2. Visual clarity
First, let’s consider copy clarity.

What do I mean by “copy clarity”?

I mean having button text that is clear — button text that answers the question, “What happens when I click this?”

When HubSpot tested the button copy on one of their own CTAs, for instance, they found that “See demo” outperformed “Test it out” by a whopping 82% (from 2.47% conversion rate to 4.49%).

Why?

Because no one knows what “Test it out” means — so fewer people are going to click it. “See demo,” on the other hand, is clear. I know what’s going to happen when I click that button and thus I’m more willing to click it.

In other words, clarity converts.

And not just in terms of button copy, also in terms of button color (or visual clarity).

Consider, as a bad example, if you were trying to buy something from this website. Where would you click?

Yeah… I’m not sure either.

Nothing immediately stands out that I should click and there are so many different things going on that I have no idea where to start.

The point is, the best websites for real estate agents make it blatantly clear what they want visitors to do.

And button color is a great way to add visual CTA clarity to your website.

HubSpot did another study where they analyzed the color of a CTA. In this study, the red button converted visitors 21% more than the green button.

Why?

Well, take a moment to look at the green button example. How much other green stuff is on the page?

As you can see, there’s enough green on the page for the button color to blend in. Sure, you can still see where you’re supposed to click. But it doesn’t immediately pop out.

Now consider the example with the red button.

Clearly, the red button immediately demands your attention.

But not because red is better than green. In this case, the red button draws your attention better because there’s very little other red content on the page. This means that you immediately notice the big red button.

The green button, on the other hand, blends in and is less visually outstanding.

The best real estate websites for agents have clear CTAs that stand out visually. That’s a trend you should consider mimicking.

7. Write The Perfect “About” Page

It seems like a no-brainer. Still, some real estate agents forget to include an “About” page on their website.

However, as you might’ve guessed, the best in the business don’t.

Here’s one example from Kelly Kingston Homes…

And another example from Krista Mashore…

That similarity among the best real estate websites for agents is no accident.

Here’s a heatmap test we ran on an agent website, which shows just how many people are clicking the “Meet The Team” tab.

And on our website, people aren’t making one of the biggest buying decisions of their life: purchasing a home.

On your website, they are. Imagine how much more important the “About” page is when visitors are trying to make a decision of that magnitude.

Much bigger.

People want to know who they are working with — and when they’re buying a house, they really want to know.

In fact, our own research revealed that the “About” tab is the third most-clicked page on real estate websites, regardless of the type of realtor.

This means that you should take a little extra time to think through your “About” page and make sure it’s a shining illustration of your company values and industry expertise.

One Carrot client — The G Team — puts their company vision, for instance, at the very top of their “About” page.

(Image Source)

Above all else, The G Team wants to build trust with the people who visit their website.

You want to do the same.

And since people are visiting your “About” page regularly, it’s a great place to do that.

8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The best real estate agent websites are the ones that show up first in Google under a relevant search.

In fact, you could argue that Google results are the biggest indicator of a great real estate agent website.

If it ranks in Google under relevant keywords, then more people click it, visit it, and, more than likely, buy from it.

Just consider that 44% of home buyers purchase a home that they found online or that 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine.

However, Google offers a lot of competition, even for the little town of Roseburg, Oregon — 766,000 results, to be exact.

With all that online competition, it’s probably no surprise to find out that 72% of real estate agents are unsatisfied with how many leads their website generates.

If you’re in that category of discouraged real estate agents, it’s alright. At Carrot, we understand.

We help tons of our client’s websites rank in Google. In fact, it’s part of every single package we offer. If you want a website that generates passive traffic consistently and pulls in leads, give us a call — we’d love to help you out.

And if you’re unsure about whether you should work with us, consider that if you type “buying farmland in Roseburg Oregon” into Google, the top-ranking result is — you guessed it! — a Carrot customer website.

There are tons of different pieces to SEO, but one of the ways that we help our clients rank in Google is by encouraging them to put their target keywords front and center on their website.

Like this, for example.

Why is this so important?

Because Google uses the title of each page on your website to determine what the page is about. If you put the topic at the… well, top, then Google will have an easier time knowing where to rank your website.

That, though, is only one small part of ranking in search engines. To learn more, go here.

Or check out our real estate agent websites and automate your SEO.

9. Include a Trust-building Blog

When prospects land on your website, there’s one thing that you need to do above all else: build trust.

If the person lands on your website and doesn’t trust you or, worse, thinks you’re a spammer, there’s no way they’re going to work with you.

In fact, the most important factor when choosing a real estate agent is honesty and credibility.

And one of the best ways to build trust with your audience is by proving to them that you know what you’re talking about.

How can you prove you know what you’re talking about?

By starting a blog and posting consistently.

If you do, you’re in good company.

Here’s G.Stiles…

And Krista Mashore…

The point is, a blog on your website can work wonders to build trust and credibility. It’s an easy addition to your website that can make a massive difference. You can also consider creating real estate infographics rather than blog posts or videos if you’d prefer.

What, though, if you don’t know what your content should discuss?

No problem. Simply ask yourself this: What are the most common questions that your prospects and customers ask you?

Then, write blog posts, create videos, or design infographics answering those common questions.

10. Glowing Testimonials, Case Studies, And Reviews

The final thing that the best real estate websites for agents have in common is glowing testimonials, case studies, and reviews.

Remember, your number one goal is to build trust with the people who visit your website.

In many cases, that alone will determine whether people work with you or not: do they trust you?

And perhaps there’s no better way to build immediate trust than with testimonials, case studies, and reviews.

In fact, 88% of people trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations from friends.

This is why the best in the business regularly use these elements.

Here’s one from Ellen Pool…

And Krista Mashore…

And The G Team…

Just how important are these reviews and customer-based ravings?

Well, one study found that brands that inspire highly emotional experiences — for which case studies are remarkable — see three times more word-of-mouth than their feeling-less counterparts.

People trust reviews and testimonials inspire customers to share your business with their friends.

Copyblogger recommends asking these questions of happy customers to collect remarkable testimonials:
1. What was the obstacle that would have prevented you from buying this product?
2. What did you find as a result of buying this product?
3. What specific feature did you like most about this product?
4. What are three other benefits of this product?
5. Would you recommend this product? If so, why?
6. Is there anything you’d like to add?
Conclusion

Today, it’s not enough to have a website. You need to have one of the best real estate agent websites in the digital world — or, at least, in your local area.

If you don’t have a great website, then you won’t rank in Google, people won’t trust you, and you will probably lose leads.

On the other hand, if you use a website with IDX integration, high-quality visuals, compelling listing descriptions, mobile-responsive design, clear CTAs, a thorough “About” page, SEO, a trust-building blog, and glowing testimonials, then you’ll not just drive deals through your website, you’ll be among the best in the business.

How’s the old adage go? “If you want to be the best, copy the best.”

Or, if you don’t have the time, you can check out Carrot’s real estate agent website builder and we’ll do all of this for you.

What trend have you noticed among the best real estate agent websites?
February 19, 2018
5 Real Estate Market Predictions (And What They Mean For The Agent And Investor)
Every year, the real estate market changes. And sometimes, it changes faster than you thought it was going to. 20 years ago, agents and investors didn’t have real estate websites — they relied on the talk of the town and coffee-shop conversations to generate business.

Of course, that is still partly true today, but with a twist: If you’re not online … then you’re behind the curve and you’re likely losing a steady amount of potential business.

Not because you suck at your job, but because people can’t find you where they’re looking: online.

That, though, is just one example of how the real estate industry is changing. That doesn’t mention constantly fluctuating inventory and interest rates or technological advancements (like drones and 3D house walkthroughs).

Clearly, you have a lot to keep track of.

To help, though, here are five real estate market predictions that we here at Carrot and some of the top real estate investors working with us are expecting to see.

1. Inventory Will Increase Slightly

Over the past few years, the U.S. has consistently broken the record for lowest inventory.

For instance, Forbes reports that, in 2010, inventory sat just under one million, at 967,604. The most recent count puts that number at 653,347.

As you already know, that low inventory means you need to be careful with your investments. It drives the cost of homes upward with bidding wars and the number of opportunities downward.

Fortunately, there’s good news on the horizon.

Samantha Sharf, Forbes columnist, continues…

“The general consensus is that inventory will pick up slightly. The biggest reason for this modest optimism is that the current situation is unsustainable. Prices cannot rise faster than wages forever. Plus, life events will eventually force reluctant sellers off the sidelines.”

And she’s not alone in her prediction. Danielle Hale, the chief economist for Realtor.com, says,

“The majority of the year should be challenging for most buyers, but we do expect growth in inventory starting in the fall… We expect the relief to start in the upper tiers, and it will make its way down to the lower tiers.”

The beginning of the year likely won’t see much change, but, by the end of the year, here’s to hoping that inventory starts on an upward slope — even if it’s slight.

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2. Renting Will Become A More Popular Option

With the cost of housing surging in certain areas, we’ll likely see an increase in the portion of people who choose to rent instead of buy.

CNBC reports that,

“In the nation’s top 50 markets, half of the housing stock is now considered overvalued, based on market fundamentals, like income and employment.”

When the price of housing moves upward, more people, generally speaking, look to renting options rather than buying options.

This, of course, depends on your location and requires that you understand the place where you invest. Overall, though, expect renters to flood the market.

Jason Bible, real estate investor in Houston, says that he’s going to try and get his hands on as many rentals as he can this year.

“We buy over 100 houses a year and this year I will buy as many rentals as I can get my hands on. In fact, I am going to buy some of them at 100% retail with a 20% down loan.”

You might want to consider doing the same.

3. Home Buyers Will Be Even More Tech Savvy

The real estate market moves fast.

But the tech world — driven in large part by social media, a mobile-first culture, and ecommerce trends shaping the future — moves even faster.

In fact, technological advancements are a big part of what makes keeping up with real estate trends difficult.

Don’t expect those innovations to slow down.

Alex, one of the marketing leads here at Carrot, recently bought a home and he signed practically every document on DocuSign rather than in-person.

Additionally, millennials — one of the first tech-savvy generations — are buying more and more houses each year. By 2025, they are expected to form twenty million new households.

Still, though, about two-thirds of millennials haven’t reached the average home buying age of 32.

(Image Source)

So we can expect the millennial home-buying trend to continue through the next few years.

And as you might have guessed, millennials aren’t just comfortable with technology; they prefer it.

This means that we’re going to the rapid adoption of apps and online tool like virtual tours, digital contract signing, and even decentralized house visits.

4. Interest Rates Will Increase By About .25% or .5%

The more that interest rates increase, the fewer people we’ll see buying homes — which would further incentive people to rent instead.

Unfortunately, interest rates are still going to rise this year. However, they probably won’t rise too significantly.

That’s not because they aren’t primed to, however. But, as real estate broker, Richard Haynes, predicts,

“Mortgage rates will rise by 0.25%, and possibly by 0.50% if things get crazy… If rates go higher than that, the Fed will step in and reinvest more principle and buy up mortgages to lower rates and get them under control.”

More than likely, an interest rate increase of .25% or .5% won’t make a remarkable impact on the number of buyers. Of course, that percentage has the potential to cruise higher.

Daniil Kleyman, a real estate developer from Richmond, VA, and owner of RehabValuator, says, “Rates are going up for sure, and probably significantly.”

No one can know exactly what’s going to happen. But rates are going to rise and the federal government will probably step in to balance those rates out once they climb too high.

5. Investors And Agents Will See Greater Competition

Overall, agents and investors have seen remarkable success during the last few years.

The economy has continued on an upward slope and unemployment has steadily decreased, which has encouraged people to spend more on housing.

In the south especially, sales are booming and expected to grow 6% rather than 2.5% — the national average.

Because of that lucrativeness, though, agents and investors will probably see a massive burst of new entrepreneurs entering the space and trying to claim their slice of the pie.

Dan Walters from Treasure Valley Home Solutions, says,

“This will be the year that we see many enter the market for the first time as an investor following the wave of hype of the nationwide real estate cycle.”

That cluttered trend means that you’ll see more competition.

Fortunately, that competition probably won’t be nearly as experienced as you are — that is if you’ve been an investor or agent for quite some time.

Which further means you shouldn’t have much trouble competing.

Still, according to our own data that we pulled from our thousands of Carrot customer spread across the U.S., lead generation is up — meaning the market is hot — but conversion rates are slightly down.

Take sellers, for instance. In past years, the number of online sessions to their websites increased by a whopping 85%. Similarly, they generated 65% more leads.

Their average conversion rate, however, went down by about 10%.

Why?

Well, even though there are lots of opportunities in the real estate industry, there are an increasing amount of people who want a piece of that opportunity.

Which means your prospects have more options than they did last year. And with more people flooding in to claim their slice of the revenue, conversion rates are softening a bit.

It’s also worth mentioning that agents will experience competition from another source. Namely, from technological advancements that threaten to either change or outright destroy their profession.

Online tools like Zillow, Matterport, and Dotloop are working toward doing what Uber did to taxis or Airbnb did to hotels.

They are moving the service of agents online, which has two noteworthy benefits for the consumer.
1. It streamlines the process.
2. It costs less money.
Edward Beck from Quick Sell Buyers goes so far as to say,

“Unfortunately, [agents] are on a downtrend. Zillow is finally gonna start taking a small market. But this is again the beginning of the end of Agents. They still have five to seven more good years. Also, flat fee companies are gonna eat a lot of market share.”

It’s unlikely that real estate agents will completely disappear over the next decade, but it’s equally ignorant to assume that nothing will happen to the profession.

Over the coming years, agents might fall into a more advisory role for high-end homes. Or they might become the much-needed experts for first-time homebuyers.

Whatever the case, agents face competition from technology and investors face competition from ambitious entrepreneurs.

What All Of This Means For Agents And Investors

Okay. Now you know what to expect. But what does all of that mean for your real estate business?

How should you be prepared to adapt this year and in the years to come?

Well, the good news is that the majority of real estate leaders expect this year and next to be phenomenal. So, despite any discouragement, you might feel toward upcoming trends, the overall picture is promising — for agents and investors alike.

What is important to recognize, however, is that, as the real estate market becomes increasingly crowded, you need to stand out from that clutter.

If your website doesn’t convert or build credibility like it should, or if it doesn’t load fast enough to rank in Google, or demand attention, then you’ll have little chance of success in 2020 and beyond.

At Carrot, we help beginner and top-level investors and agents drive traffic, pull leads, and land deals.

We encourage our customers to use video testimonials like this one from Nexus Homebuyers…

And as you can see, below, Nexus Homebuyers doesn’t stop with one.

(Image Source)

We also encourage our customers to dive right into what they do and why they’re awesome on the homepage of their website.

(Image Source)

Remember, this is the first thing that people see when visiting your page. Use it to build credibility and trust as fast as you can.

More than likely, the person landing on your website has a few other tabs open as well — browsing through their options.

You need to stand out as the best and most friendly.

For investors and agents, alike, having a “How it works” page can help to eliminate your prospect’s fears and make them more comfortable with giving you a call.

You can do something similar to what We Buy Homes in Tucson does.

If you want to learn more about how Carrot can help you stand apart from the rest of the crowd, you can go here and read all about it (we’d love to work with you :-) ).

Additionally, consider this advice that real estate investor, Tom Cafarella — the number-one home buyer in Boston who buys and flips over 100 homes each year — offers for the upcoming year.

“This means that we need to: (1) make sure we have enough cash on the sideline to capitalize on the market when it does change, (2) do less — or no — long-term projects so that we don’t get caught in the market shift, and (3) wholesale more and close on less, so that we are taking on less risk.”

For the changing market, that’s advice worth taking to heart.

Also, a side-note worth discussing is the current lucrativeness of the real estate coaching industry.

Dan Barrett from Adwords Nerds, says

“The REI coaching business is booming.”

Since so many new agents and investors are entering the real estate scene, those newbies need people to teach them.

If you’re an experienced investor or agent, then you might want to consider leveraging this trend and starting your own online course. This could generate another source of income to supplement your real estate work while not taking a ton of extra time.

Said another way, if you want to get into the real estate coaching world, now’s a perfect time.

Every investor and agent will adapt to the changing real estate environment differently. How you do it is, naturally, your own choice.

Above all else, though,
1. Build immediate credibility on your website.
2. Adapt to unexpected shifts in the market.
3. Avoid long-term projects.
4. Leverage technology rather than avoiding it.
Real Estate Market Predictions for 2020 and Beyond

Each year brings new developments to the real estate world.

Some of those, you anticipate. Others, you don’t.

But one thing’s for sure. The real estate world will change. And if you’re not ready to adapt to it, then your business will suffer.

If, on the other hand, you build credibility on your website to stand above the cluttered market, consider leveraging rental properties, and utilize technology that can increase your business’ success (like drones and 3D tours), 2020 will be a great year.

Best of luck this year and, please, let us know how it goes and if there’s anything we can do to help you.

And what do you think? Are there any trends we missed? Or do you think any of our predictions are wrong?

Let us know your opinion in the comment section of this article.

[cta offer=”seoagents” color=”red”]
February 14, 2018
From Broke to #1 Home Buyer in Boston: How Carrot Has Helped Tom Cafarella Generate 100+ Deals Per Year

Have you ever wondered if you’re on the right path? If your passion for building a sustainable business with passive income that creates financial freedom for you and your family is actually possible?

After all, maybe the wildly successful people are just the lucky ones. The ones who have that special temperament or were raised by that unique family.

Maybe you’re just not cut out for the success you dream of one-day achieving.

Or maybe, Tom Cafarella is right.

Tom Cafarella is the #1 home buyer in Boston, where they fix and flip over 100 homes every year (see how many Leads Carrot has generated), they have 150 team members, and he has a yearly marketing budget of $1 million.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

“How will I benefit from Tom’s story? He’s just one of the lucky ones.”

Well, actually, he isn’t.

We wanted to note that Tom was the #1 Home Buyer in Boston before Carrot. He owns a very successful real estate brokerage company in the Boston area and has been highly successful with direct mail, radio, and billboards. Also prior to Carrot, he had online marketing experience with different customized websites. But, it wasn’t until he joined and implemented the Carrot system, that his online lead volume doubled.

Hearing his story and learning what he did to get where he is might inspire you.

Let’s break down his journey into real estate investor lead generation and the Carrot system

In all started when Tom was born. He wasn’t born into a wealthy family where he inherited massive amounts of money and loads of entrepreneurial wisdom.

Quite the opposite.

Tom struggled financially and couldn’t seem to get ahead of the incoming bills. Growing up, Tom learned the consequences of being poor and he committed to himself that he would never live a life where money was an issue.

So what did he do?

He poured all of his heart into education, believing that through good grades and a marketable skill set, he would make plenty of money and never struggle with finances again.

After majoring in pre-med in college and getting straight A’s throughout practically his whole school experience — which he hated, by the way — Tom decided to double major in accounting.

At the time, accounting jobs were everywhere and Tom saw it as a way to secure his financial corner of this world. He would get a safe job that could support his family and he would work every day for 8 hours.

That is until he started working. Shortly after finishing school, he received a job at an accounting firm. He arrived the first day for work, took a seat at his desk, and immediately hated his job.

“It was worse than jail,” Tom described.

His entrepreneurial spirit wouldn’t allow him to work a desk job where he had very little say in his schedule, the company’s progress, or anything else business-related.

He needed a way out. But how? How could he get out of this hole he had dug himself into?

Tom didn’t know.

So he bought lots of books that discuss success and happiness and studied the process for pursuing true financial freedom.

As he did, he started to learn more and more about real estate as an entrepreneurial industry.

He became fascinated with real estate agents, wholesaling, and investing.

As he invested an increasing amount of time into his newfound real estate passion, relations at his accounting job got rickety and he was eventually fired for being so often side-tracked.

Tom was 25 years old when he got fired and he felt like a total failure. He didn’t immediately tell his family because of the ensuing embarrassment he was expecting.

Eventually, though, Tom realized that getting fired wasn’t the worst thing that happened to him. In fact, it’s exactly what would free him.

Since Tom was still living with his parents and had very little risk involved, he decided to pursue his dream of building a remarkable real estate business in Boston.

To start, he was a real estate agent.

But, after a while, he was given the opportunity to do a wholesale deal. One that he made a whopping $115,000 off of.

Although he admits that that deal was unusual, he got excited none-the-less and decided to start investing all of his time into building a wholesaling business.

At the time, though, he didn’t know how to replicate the deal he had done. How do you bring in more leads consistently? How do you convert these leads? How do you find qualified leads?

These were all questions that needed answers.

So Tom worked 100-hour work weeks for a while to build his real estate investing business.

Getting Through 100 Hour Work Week [Source: Nathan Peck, Director of Marketing at DollarHobbyz]

Real Estate Investor Lead Generation with Tom, Facebook, and the Carrot System

As he learned and become more adept in the real estate industry, his business became increasingly successful.

He tested everything with his marketing tactics — from SEO and PPC to Facebook Ads for real estate and bandit signs. Some things worked. Others didn’t.

Find out the exact system Tom uses for his Facebook marketing Read it here.

But he wondered how is website was performing and if it could be better. He kept hearing talk of us here at Carrot and decided to give us a try.

Immediately, his lead conversion more than doubled.

He originally thought that his current website was fine, but after using Carrot, he learned the value of using a website that’s built for conversion upon years and years of thousands of a/b tests for real estate investors.

Nothing can replace that, and at $100 per month, Tom claims having a Carrot website is a no-brainer.

“If people don’t have a Carrot website, I won’t help them, because that’s where they need to start.” Tom said.

Tom swears that marketing is the most influential part of his business and attributes his success to savvy marketing tactics. And right now, Facebook Ads for real estate is the most powerful marketing strategy that his business uses.

Already a Carrot Member? Watch Our Advanced Coaching Call: How Tom Cafarella Pulls In 100+ Seller Leads Per Week (mostly with Facebook) Watch it here.

Real estate Facebook ads are incredibly targeted and Tom emphasizes the fact that other real estate investors should spend the bulk of their time thinking about their relevance score.

A high relevance score on Facebook will lower your cost per lead and make your business more successful because of it.

The Why and How of Getting Leads from Facebook Ads for Real Estate [Infographic] Learn more here.

Already a Carrot Member?
Check Out Carrot’s Facebook Leads Masterclass

Learn how to drive leads to your site and build an audience with Facebook marketing.

Just make sure that you’re sending all of those leads to a qualified website (Carrot is what Tom recommends), otherwise, all of those leads are going to waste and your cost per conversion starts to climb through the roof.

Whatever you do and regardless of your budget, Tom says you must market and you must consistently market.

Pay attention to current leads and don’t let old leads die. Find a way to keep in touch with the people who’ve been leads for a long time because chances are, they’ll eventually be ready to buy. You just have to give them the necessary time and build a trustworthy relationship.

Your goal as a real estate investor should always be to keep increasing your marketing budget and your ROI.

Pay more to make more.

Additionally, Tom believes in using marketing tactics that very few people in the area are using to help yourself stand out. Tom loves cold calling for this reason — it stands out from everyone else’s marketing efforts.

Tom is 35 years old now and he’s living the dream he’s always wanted.

He’s financially free and his business is thriving.

Throughout Tom’s story resonates one particularly important point: hard work will take you where you want to go.

When asked what makes the difference between someone is successful and someone who isn’t, Tom said,

“Just one thing: hard work.”

On Tom’s wall behind his desk, there’s a quote that reads, “Ultimately the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.” And he’s right. But all of this takes time. None of it happens quickly and you have to invest an inordinate amount of time to get where you want to go.

For those who do, they have very few regrets. Are you willing to put in the time and effort?

As Tom says …

“You can get rich, but you have to build the business.”

If you are willing, connect with us here at Carrot and we’ll make it happen for you. After all, real estate investor lead generation with some experts at your back is a whole lot easier than doing it alone.

Hit us up in the comments and we’ll connect with you personally.

Already a Carrot Member?
Check Out Carrot’s Facebook Leads Masterclass

Learn how to drive leads to your site and build an audience with Facebook marketing.

January 25, 2018
[Product Update] Member Site Optimizations
The 2017 year was a great year of growth for Carrot! We talked more about that in our year-in-review post, but wanted to take a closer look at some of the technical growth that has come from our development team this year to continue to support the thousands of Carrot websites out there, and be ready for thousands more!

We’ve released and talked about many other features like automatic image compression that give our member’s site a performance edge, but here’s a behind the scenes look at what makes Carrot special and sets us apart from even the most sophisticated hosting service you might get from a “typical” web host.

Not your momma’s shared hosting

A huge benefit from Carrot’s growth has been the ability to create a full-time development team. Jason joined us full time this year and has tackled head-on the virtual nuts and bolts of serving Carrot websites to your customers.

It has always been important to us that Carrot websites be fast and reliable, and that can’t change as we grow – things should get even faster and more reliable!

You’re in good company on Carrot’s custom AWS powered platform.

Asset CDN

The first step for us was moving all of your site assets to a distributed CDN (content delivery network). This means once your website is loaded by a visitor, all the images you have uploaded to your site are served from an additional server located close to your visitor.

Faster because we are using a system built for speedy image delivery, and we are spreading the load of serving the whole site onto multiple systems.

Kinda like when they open that fancy new grocery store super close to your house.

App Cluster

Next, we took that same idea and applied it to the initial load of your website – spread that job of serving carrot sites out to a cluster of servers.

This is like moving from that single checkout mom-and-pop store, to multiple checkout lines at the grocery store.

Auto-Scaling

Finally, we implemented a system to control the size of our application cluster, so no matter how many visitors (or bots) are hitting your site at any time, we can keep up with the demand and scale up/down our number of servers accordingly.

Like when they open up more cash registers at checkout!

Top of the scoreboard – Pagespeed

Now that we knew Carrot sites were always highly available to visitors, we let Austin take a look at the way your Carrot sites load in your web browser.

What we found is that while Carrot sites performed better than our competitors in tests like Google’s Pagespeed test, we found more room to improve.

Member Site Optimizations: Allowing customization with optimization

Tests like Google Pagespeed are designed to show you how close you are to ideal conditions – this is very hard to get perfect while allowing for customizations!

These perfect numbers are typically achieved by web developers who can control the whole build process of their website – not a user-editable/customizable website platform.

For example, some of Google’s own websites score in the red:

And often times the things that Google’s Pagespeed test are warning about are when members are using Google’s own products like Adwords. So! There is no sense shooting for a perfect score… but the closer we could get, we knew we would be giving our members and their customers the best experience possible.

Latest Update

This latest release includes:
- Asynchronous font loading (so we can keep our beautiful custom fonts without the penalty)
- A new custom build process to reduce the use of separate JS & CSS files
- Further mobile optimizations to make sure we are serving optimal image sizes in more places on mobile devices
- A custom jQuery implementation to allow for the use of custom jQuery Javascript on your site without any delay in page load speed
The results

For our base sites, this netted an average Mobile Pagespeed scores increase of 26 points, up to 88/100.

And their average Desktop Pagespeed score increase of 15 points, up to 91.5/100.

These scores are fun to look at, but does this translate to more leads? Yeah, probably! We will need to continue to measure over the long term… but it is commonly accepted that a faster website has less risk of visitors on slow connections becoming frustrated and leaving without a conversion, and if Google starts factoring these sores into their ranking algorithm – we’re ready!

What’s Next?

We’re always looking at what’s next and will continue to monitor and improve our systems and service to keep things fast and modern. We’re finishing out our 2018 product roadmap right now and can’t wait to share even more improvements and new features in the future!
January 11, 2018
Does SEO Work for Small Real Estate Markets? [Whiteboard]
Transcript

Hey, guys and gals. This is Trevor with Carrot, coming at you with another series of Carrot strategy sketches. Today, we’re gonna be talking about small market versus big market.

But, before I do, I want to throw a shout-out to one of our long-time clients and good friends of mine, Doug Faith, representing the Legacy Capital shirt you sent me a little bit ago. Man, I really appreciate you … Me, as a client, and you, as a client as ours, here at Carrot. Thanks, man. I’m gonna represent Legacy Capital. If you’re in Pennsylvania and you guys need capital to flip houses, go to Doug at legacycapitalpa.com.

Does SEO Work for Small Real Estate Markets?

Are you in a small market and you’re kind of wondering, hey, does Search Engine Optimization actually work for my market? Now, we get that question all the time here at Carrot. Is, shoot, can I, should I invest in Search Engine Optimization if I’m in a market of 30,000 people, 100,000 people, of a quarter million people, versus a large market, like Dallas or some other large market like that?

Well, my short answer is 100% yes. Do not get discouraged because you’re in a small market. Now, the dynamics are gonna be a little bit different. I’m gonna walk you through what you should do and kind of how to set your mindset there.

Then, we have other resources here at Carrot, other strategy sketches, coaching calls that we do for our clients, content pro members are above every single week. We have our three lead per day training, as well, that dives in deep on the specific strategies of SEO.

Large Real Estate Market Versus Small Real Estate Market SEO

The large market versus the small market. Here we go. The first thing is what qualifies as a large market or a small market? Well, there are lots of different definitions that we can kind of follow here, but I’m gonna follow this right there.
- Are you less than 100,000 people?
- Are you between 100,000 and 500,000 people population in your market area?
- Or, are you 500,000 and above?
That’s population in your primary market area, okay? As an example, I live in a town called Roseburg, Oregon, where we’re here right now in our studio at the loft in Roseburg. It’s a small town. It’s a town of between 20 and 30,000 people, so would we be able to flip five, ten houses a month in Roseburg just using SEO? 100% no.

So, one of the first things we need to do is we need to set our expectations, first of all.

You need to set those expectations for what your market is going to be able to handle. If you have these dreams of flipping 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 houses a year in Roseburg with SEO, you probably better reset those expectations and, then, implement what I’m about to teach you, okay?

If you’re in a large market and you’re looking to flip two, four, five, ten houses a month, a market like a Houston or a Dallas or many other markets, is that realistic? 100% yes. But you’ve got to go after and implement the strategy I’m gonna lay out, okay?

The first thing right here, if you’re in a smaller market like we are here in Roseburg or you’re in a town, like Medford, Oregon, which is around 80 to 100,000 people.

What we’re gonna do here is we’re going to expand our strategy. Because we can’t just go after the main keyword phrases for house-sellers like we buy houses or sell my house fast or cash home buyers, in that one city and think that we’re gonna get enough leads to fuel a two, four, five, ten deal a month business.

So what we want to do is we want to expand our keywords and we want to expand our markets. By expanding our keywords, what I mean is, you can’t just go after the one or two primary keywords in that market for sellers or for buyers or whatever you’re going after.

Go after those ones because that’s probably gonna be 60 to 80% of your overall traffic for sellers in that market.

But then expand them out. Go after more niche down phrases, like your probate phrases, like I’m selling a house in divorce or lots of different phrases and reasons why someone would sell their house.

If you’re going after cash buyers, go after phrases, like handyman properties or fixer-upper properties in insert city. Discount properties, cheap properties, cheap real estate, investment real estate, buying investment properties. Expand your keywords out in that market.

Targeting Different Markets

The next thing we’re gonna do is target other markets around ours, okay? We have a client here in Oregon and he mainly operates in rural parts of Oregon.

He really doesn’t operate in the main part where the main population is in Northern Oregon where Portland is. Now, he does have great rankings there, but his main thing is rural.

If he were to focus just on Roseburg or just on Medford or Grants Pass or any one of those cities, he wouldn’t be getting the deal volume he is right now.

But he has a massive band assigned strategy and his SEO and PPC is all based around expanding the markets. He’s in about 10 to 20 different markets right now, doing between 5 and 15 deals a month.

Expand your keywords and expand your markets if you’re in a smaller area, that’s gonna take care of your lead volume. You cannot stay just focusing on that one market with one or two keywords and have the deal volume that’s gonna sustain you.

Very similar strategy for 100,000 – 500,000. The thing is, you’re just gonna be getting more leads when you get those rankings, get the traffic coming in. So you might need to expand it into fewer markets or to fewer keywords because the population’s larger, but you are still going to need to expand.

Once again, going back to an example that is type of that city, like a Eugene, Oregon. Now, I’m using Oregon because I’m familiar with the area … Or Bend, which is around 100,000 plus mark.

You’re probably not gonna fuel a 5 to 10 deal a month business in just one of those cities, but if you tackle both of them and maybe six or seven other cities around that … Redmond and Prineville, and go down into Klamath Falls and come over to Roseburg. Then, tool up your business to be able to serve those markets.

Then, you’re gonna be able to really build a really, really consistent and stable platform in your house flipping business. Or if you’re doing another type of business, I always use the plumbing example.

If you’re in a tiny, tiny market and you want to grow a bigger business, expand it out to other service areas, and make sure you’ve set up your business to do so.

Expanding Into a Large Real Estate Market

Last, if you’re in a larger market. 500,000 isn’t that large of a market. A lot of the larger metro areas are a million plus, a million, 1.5 million, whatever it is. You can completely go deep in that market. If you’re in a Dallas and a Houston, in a large city in Florida, you can keep on going on down that list.

You can completely sustain your business in that large market. Portland, Oregon, as an example. One of our clients, Joe Taylor, which we’re gonna be doing a CarrotCast with him, is the largest home buyer in that area. Buys tons of homes and he’s just in that area. He has a very, very big business because he’s going deep.

He’s going deep on his direct mail net market, he’s going deep on his other marketing strategies, and he’s going really deep on his SEO, targeting multiple websites in that same market. Also, doing some PPC, I believe, don’t quote me on that. But, then, go deep in that market even further to capture it.

Go deep there, get the top two to three keywords, focus on those in that market first, and, then, expand out to more niche down, longer tail keyword phrases, like selling a house without a real estate agent in Portland, as an example. Then, from there, you start to hit the suburbs around that. You’ve got your Sherwood’s, you’ve got your Tigard, Tualatin, and Gresham, that kind of thing. So, that’s how you expand there.

Long-Term SEO Thinking

A couple other tips here really quick. Think long-term. Anything with SEO, we’ve talked about so many times, anything with SEO, you’ve got to be a long-term thinker in there. If you’re not, you should probably hang up your gloves right now and go try something else because long term is exactly what SEO is, and if you don’t think long-term, you might as well burn your money, all right?

Next is small markets are great, so don’t get discouraged because you’re in a small market. We have a lot of clients in small markets that are doing very, very well. We just have to go back up to tip number one with setting expectations and, then, making sure that you know your expectations in that market.

If you’re in a market, like Roseburg, of 30,000 people, you’re probably only gonna get, if you rank number one in Google for the main keyword phrases, you’re probably only gonna get between 2 and 10 leads per month from that.

Then, you add on some PPC and, then, you add on some other keywords. You’re probably not gonna get more than 10 to 15 motivated house sellers coming in, in that market. Max. That’s if you’re going after that.

So, you hit up the five or ten other cities around you, expand deeper there, then, that’s how you start to get your 20, 30, 40, 50 plus leads a month.

Are you going after a small market strategy? Sweet. Stack ’em up and expand. If you’re going after a big market strategy, dive deep.

Go After It!

Go after it, hit us up with your progress on that. Email us at support@oncarrot.com and let us know if you need any help. If you’re a Carrot client, we have our weekly coaching calls every single week where you can ask those questions. We can dive in and help you craft a plan for SEO or PPC or getting your website conversion up.

If you’re not a customer, go try us out. Go to oncarrot.com/plans, join. You have a 30-day trial to give us a try and see if it’s a fit for you. I think you’ll really, really like it, but know you’ve got to work your butt out, you’ve got to either invest your time or money, but also know we’re here for you. We are the best. We’re gonna help you get that result.

All right. Take it easy. Check out the other whiteboard strategy sketches on our YouTube channel and subscribe here in this video, so you can get first updates to all of them that come out.

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November 16, 2017
How To Build Local Real Estate Citations For Agents & Investors
Local real estate citations are an important local SEO ranking factor and an integral piece for your real estate marketing framework.

Along with other factors such as backlinks, local citations are one of the leading ranking factors for search engines to decide on the relevance of your website for local search results.

Basically, a real estate business that is consistently mentioned on other trusted and relevant websites achieve higher rankings in search results than a business that is never mentioned.

Obviously, ranking high for search results means that more potential leads will find your real estate website, which will have a positive impact on both on and offline traffic, branding, and conversions.

Use the following local real estate citations tips and add them to your Local SEO Tips for Your Real Estate Marketing playbook.

Doing this ONE SIMPLE THING may help push you over the edge and could very well be one of the most effective SEO things you do this spring.

Get an advantage with your Carrot site and learn how to drive quality traffic to your site.

What Are Local Real Estate Citations?

First, don’t confuse citations with links.

Remember, citations are just mentions of your name, address, and phone number. Google will increase your business’s relevance and strength within your specific city or region.

Yes, some of your business listings within the citation sites include a link to your website, but very few contribute to any Page Rank or “link juice”. Basically, you are claiming your digital footprint with Citations.

Moz explains local citations as:

Citations are defined as mentions of your business name and address on other webpages—even if there is no link to your website. An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your business is listed, but not linked to. Citations can also be found on local chamber of commerce pages, or on a local business association page that includes your business information, even if they are not linking at all to your website.

Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google and Bing. Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations.

Citations from well-established and well-indexed portals (i.e., Superpages.com) help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business’s contact information and categorization. To paraphrase former Arizona Cardinals’ coach Dennis Green, citations help search engines confirm that businesses “are who we thought they were!”

Google is always looking for websites that are real. Citations are one way to show Google that you’re a legit and real company.

Why Are Local Real Estate Citations So Important For SEO?

So, why are building citations for local SEO so important?

One reason is the vastly growing mobile search factor. According to a study done by Search Engine Land, 78% of local searches on mobile and 61% of local searches on laptops resulted in offline transactions.

Mobile devices (not counting tablets) account for over 56% of our member leads. There will continue to be a steady rise in consumer and company adoption of mobile devices.

It’s not a question anymore if mobile is important for real estate. It’s here and you MUST pay attention to it.

Another reason: Citations Correlate with Search Rankings

Local citations improve your search rankings through ongoing creation of relevant and consistent NAP information (name, address, phone number) across hundreds of websites, also known as citation sources.

The more consistent, relevant and localized your citations are, the more likely your business will be at ranking for people searching for your services and products in your area. Citations are basically another source of credibility that both Google & Bing consider when your business NAP is consistent across the web.

Image Source: BonsaiMedia

What Is NAP And Why It Is Important

The number one most important thing: Make sure your NAP is 100% correct every time.

DON’T GET IT WRONG

Overall, the biggest contributor is the citation. There is link value within your listings that help strengthen the association of your website with your NAP information.

So, what is NAP?

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. It is a crucial piece for any business who is striving to rank well in the local organic search results.

Search engines like Google take your information into account when determining which companies to show for local, geo-targeted, searches.

Again, it’s extremely important that you make sure your NAP is 100% correct. That takes into account, both your NAP on your website as well as any other sites that you have your information on throughout the internet.

It’s a consensus that local SEO experts believe Google, Bing, and all of the other search engines link your NAP information across websites that contain this information as a validation that you are a real and legit business.

The more localized citations you can build up with consistent NAP information, the better your chances are of ranking higher.

You should enter your NAP information into a directory with a strong reputation. This is especially true with real estate specific directories and/or your local directories.

What Happens If Your NAP Isn’t Consistent?

Infographic Source: Digital Information World

Before You Dive Into Building Your Local Real Estate Citations

Prepare yourself by using this little cheat sheet of the most commonly asked for pieces of information.
- Your Name
- Company Name – The company’s exact name
- Email Address – Your email that will be connected to your business
- Address – The company’s exact address
- City – The company’s exact city name
- State- The state the company resides
- Zip – The zip code of the company
- Phone Number – The local phone number of the exact business location
- Company Website Landing Page – The landing page for the business
Set up a dedicated email address

Don’t use your main email address or your personal one.
These business directory websites usually make money by trying to sell advertising services.
So you may start to get a lot of “junk” email and some solicitation phone calls. The calls will tail off within a month or two, but the emails can really fill up an inbox.
Use the email address to confirm submissions, then let it capture the sales emails so it doesn’t clog your normal inbox.

Top Real Estate Citation Sites

Here are some of the top real estate citation sources. Please note that some of these services require a paid membership.

Yellowpages.com
BBB.org
Yelp
YouTube
SuperPages
City-Data
Citysearch
Yellowbook.com
Yahoo Local
Angie’s List
Facebook
MerchantCircle
Dex Knows
HomeAdvisor (formally ServiceMagic)
Manta
Bing Places
FourSquare
LinkedIn
Hotfrog
InsiderPages
Your Local Chamber of Commerce

Local Citation Sites For Real Estate Agents

Zillow.com
Commercialsearch.realtor.com
Trulia.com
Loopnet.com
Luxuryrealestate.com
Connect.homes.com
Rentals.com
Reals.com
How Long Does It Take To See Results?

If you decide to take on citations yourself, it takes about 3-6 hours for the building process.

To get started, go to each citation website and submit your listing.

It varies on how long it’ll take per submission, but plan on 10-15 minutes each. You’ll be required to confirm each submission in the dedicated email account you setup.

Some listing go live fast, others may take weeks, others months. But the majority of them should be live within 2-5 weeks.

In general, SEO Rankings take:

Zero Competition Market: 2-3 Months (if there’s zero competition there’s usually not much opportunity)

Small Competition Market: 6-9 Months

Medium Competition Market: 1 Year

High Competition Market: 2+ years

Typically if you’ve done them right and you’ve completed 40+ on quality sites… you can see a ranking improvement within 2-3 months. That is assuming all other elements on your site are optimized for real estate SEO.

Make Your Own Website Your Best Citation

Make it really easy for Google to identify your website with your citation profile. Most likely the best citation you can start with is your own contact page.

Be sure to have your company name, address, and phone number on there.

Bonus Tip: Add the embed of your Google Places map to help Google further tie your website to that company name and location.

Grab the Google Map “Embed Map” code and paste in into the HTML section of your website. And, this will take about 60 seconds to do it!

Real Estate Citations Frequently Asked Questions

Question #1: How fast will SEO be impacted?

Two to three months is about the time SEO could start showing an impact. Although it might not be dramatic at first. As stated above, there is a chance that highly competitive markets will take longer. Many, many months, if not years.

Question #2: Should I trickle citations out slowly or do them all at once?

Nope – you can do them all at once if you want. There is no evidence that speed of citation claiming will harm your SEO. It is not like backlink building where you can do it wrong.

Question #3: What if I use a tracking phone number for online marketing?

Overall… be sure to use the same phone number for citations that is soon your Contact Page of your website.

You can still have a tracking number in your calls to action and at the top of the site, but it’s suggested that your main company phone number is on the Contact page – therefore matching citations.

Question #4: Should I use a keyword as my business name?

Ideally… NO.

You’ll see some people ranking well with their Yelp or Facebook pages because they used a keyword as their company name.

Unless that is your company name or domain name, don’t do that.

Go with your actual company name or “Doing Business As” (DBA) name.

Question #5: What if I haven’t filed a business name yet?

If you’re serious about this business…

…you need to make that mental commitment of making it real and filing your business with your state.

If you can’t commit to that, it will be difficult to commit to the hard work it will take to succeed as a real estate entrepreneur.

So go out there and file your company name and get that done!

Verifying Your Citations For Real Estate And NAP

Not sure if you correctly submitted your citations? There are online tools that can help you find your listing all of your NAP citations.

Companies such as Whitespark feature easy to use citation finder tools.

Usually, you’ll need to enter some location data into the citation finder tool and you will get back a list of citations pertaining to the entered business and location.

Once you get the data back check the consistency of your NAP.

If there are citation websites that don’t have your correct business name, address and/or phone number then you should start reaching out to these sites or getting site access to update your citation.

Your goal is consistency.

Spelling mistakes or minor inconsistencies in your business name can have an impact on your local search rankings.

If your location is listed as Blvd on one website and as Road on another website, correcting this can have a huge impact.

Local Real Estate Citations Building Can Be a Pain, So Here’s How We Make It Easy…

In simple words, citations are important for your website’s rankings, especially in local SEO. If you want to boost your website’s rankings, focus on citations and don’t worry about the backlinks.

You will have plenty of other places to get backlinks from. Focus on citations from reputable websites with good page rank and domain authority.

Citation building is one of the simplest SEO practices for real estate agents ad investors.

How to do it if you don’t want to do the work: Checkout the Carrot marketplace. We have a real estate citations service that can do it for you.

If you’re a Carrot member (very soon we’ll be offering non-member 3LPD services), we have a whole section on citation building in our 3 Lead Per Day Training (you can buy it here) so we thought we’d share it with you as a great SEO resource to jumpstart your year. You can access the entire 3 Lead Per Day Training and all 50+ detailed videos and checklists for only $99.
August 31, 2017
Product Update – Now Get More From Your Stats Dashboard!

We’re constantly improving things around here to provide more value and an easier experience for Carrot members. Today, it’s your website’s “Stats” view.

Here’s what you need to know about our new Carrot Member stats dashboard.

1. We redesigned the layout of the main stats page, simplifying it and making recent changes and noteworthy stats stand out more.

2. Improved loading speed.

3. We reorganized the page data. You can now see which page gets you the most leads, visits, and conversions.

4. We incorporated interactive graphs. You can now scroll over each data point to easily see specific daily numbers.

5. We included a donut graph for acquisition sources (partly because everyone loves donuts and partly because it’s easy to read).

Take advantage of the new data.

As usual, we would love any feedback you have on these changes. Go check them out in your dashboard and come back here and comment and let us know what you think.

Are these changes helpful?

August 30, 2017
[Guide] 4 Steps To Dominating Local Off-Page SEO For Real Estate Investors
In March, we updated our post, On Page SEO: The 12 Key Steps To Optimize Your Real Estate Investor Web Pages. But while some SEO happens onsite — with keyword placement and internal links — the majority of SEO magic takes place elsewhere.

But where?

At a little place called off-page SEO. But what is off-page SEO for real estate investors and how can you use it to get a higher website ranking — meaning more traffic, leads, and conversions?

Keep reading.

What Is Off-Page SEO for Real Estate Investors?

Off-page SEO, defined loosely, is anything you do to improve your rankings that’s not on your website. Some of the most popular off-page SEO tactics include backlinks, citations, and relational marketing.
- Backlinks are when another website links to your website, which tells Google that you can be trusted.
- Citations are consistency between your business name, phone number, and address across multiple databases. This tells Google that your business is up-to-date and relevant.
- Relational marketing is staying active on critical platforms for your industry to increase the number of people who are familiar with your brand. Every time someone goes to your website and browses, it tells Google that someone trusts you and it helps your rankings.
But how, exactly, do you implement these real estate off-page SEO techniques to reap the rankings of a pro?

Here’s 4 critical real estate investor off-page SEO tactics.

1. Know How You’re Currently Ranking

Know what keywords you’re targeting and how you’re currently ranking for those keywords before you try to improve.

Without a metric to measure against, you won’t know what improvement looks like.

If you’re not a Carrot member, simply open an incognito browser window (to disregard your personal cookies) and search for the keywords that you’re aiming for. Depending on how diligent you’ve been in optimizing your rankings, you might have to click through a few pages. But don’t get discouraged. That’s why you’re here, right?

If you’re a Carrot member, you have access to our keyword tracker. Just go into your Carrot dashboard and click on rankings on the side. Then add a keyword you’d like to track — we’ll do all the heavy lifting, updating weekly to let you know whether you’re going up or down through the rankings.

Note: To find out more about our keyword ranking tracker, check out this in-depth post.

2. Build Citations

Citations are a staple of local SEO for real estate. Citations — sometimes referred to as social signals — are the information about your business you put into different online consumer-reference sites.

Superpages is an example of a yellow-pages-type website that uses citations regularly. Social media business accounts, like your Facebook business page, are also citations.

Your name, phone number, and address need to be the same on each website. This tells Google that your business is active, updated, and relevant. Generally, the more matching citations you have, the better you’ll rank.

Image via BonsaiMedia

There’s two ways to go about this.
1. You can do it yourself (for an in-depth guide on exactly how to do it yourself, click here).
2. Or Carrot can build the citations for you. Click here to find out more about our citation building service.
3. Get Backlinks

Backlinks are when another website links to your website. When they do, this tells Google that the other website trusts you — which is good for your rankings.

If you’re in a competitive space, backlinks often make the difference between a result-one ranking and a page-one ranking. But getting backlinks takes work.

What kind of work?

There’s a few different techniques you can use but the first thing you should do regardless of your technique is make a spreadsheet of the blogs, podcasts, and websites you’d like to collaborate with.

Include their name, contact info, niché, number of followers, and any other information that’s relevant. Use this as your database for people you’d like to get a backlink from and then use the below techniques to actually do so.

Technique #1 — Guest Post

Guest posting is a great way to acquire backlinks.

Remember that the person you’re pitching has an audience of their own. The topic and angle you propose should be a perfect fit for their audience. When you email them, emphasize the benefit they’ll get by having you as a guest.

Pitch them on the idea with an email that’s something like this:

Hello, [Name]!

I absolutely loved your recent [type of content] about [subject of content]. In particular, I loved the part where you discussed [something specific you liked].

That’s really relevant to where I’m currently at in my own business ventures. So first off, thank you.

Second, I was wondering if you’d like to collaborate.

I’m a real estate investor in [your city] with [tell something compelling about yourself — i.e. X amount of followers. X amount of deals. X amount of revenue]. And I think a topic about [pitch your topic] would be super beneficial to your audience.

I’d love to make this happen for you.

What do you think?

Let me know if this is a fit for you and we can talk more :-)

Mike

Once they agree to your topic, if it’s a podcast, just ask them if they’ll include a link to your website in the description of the podcast. If you’re writing a blog post for them, you can include a link to your website in the author bio or in the post itself. Just make sure you respect their website rules.

Technique #2 — Create An Amazing Piece Of Content

The other way to acquire backlinks is to create a high-level piece of content on your own website and then ask other relevant websites to share and link to it.

Consider creating either an infographic or a blog post.

For an infographic, you can create your own at Canva or Venngage and check out our post here to get topical ideas for your infographic. Or you can hire someone at Fiverr or 99designs to do it for you.

For a blog post, check out our idea bank here and our piece about creating great real estate content here. Then, email websites that you think might be willing to share and link to your content. Say something like this:

Hello, [Name]!

I absolutely loved your recent [type of content] about [subject of content]. In particular, I loved the part where you discussed [something specific you liked].

That’s really relevant to where I’m currently at in my own business ventures. So first off, thank you.

Second, I just created a [blog post or infographic] on [topic]. You can check it out here [link]. I think this piece would be super relevant to your audience and I was wondering if you’d be willing to share it on your blog. If you’d like, I can write up an introduction for you as well.

Let me know what you think!

Mike

Technique #3 — Monitor Mentions

You might not know this.

But you can monitor mentions of your brand name across the web. In other words, whenever people are talking about you online, you’ll be able to see it and engage with it (unless it’s in a private messenger).

How? You can subscribe to a service like TalkWalker or Mention. These places will monitor a huge portion of the internet and notify you whenever your brand name is mentioned. You’ll then be free to go engage in the conversation at your own pace.

Doing this will not only help you interact with the people who are talking about your brand, it will help you find people who are referencing you on their blog as well. If you notice that someone referenced you on their blog but didn’t link to your website, track down their contact information and ask them to throw in a link.

Something like this:

Hello, [Name]!

I’m honored that you included me in your piece about [content piece]. Seriously amazing article and I’m stoked that I made the cut! :-)

Would you be willing to add this link to your blog post so people can find my stuff from your piece: [link].

I would seriously appreciate it.

Thanks again for including me!

Mike

Most people will be more than willing to add your link to their website when you ask.

A Final Note On Backlinks

Be aware of the difference between “do-follow” links and “no-follow” links.

Some websites use “no-follow” links. This means that the link to your website will still work for anyone who clicks on it, but the link is formatted to intentionally tell Google not to count the backlink toward your domain authority.

Some websites use this because linking to low-domain authority websites can actually hurt the ranking of their own website.

To find out, ask the website coordinator that is going to link to you if they use “no-follow” links or “do-follow” links. “Do-follow” links are the best.

Note: No-follow links aren’t useless. For one, they still get your website in front of a new audience. And there’s even some recent data that Google is listening less and less to no-follow links. It seems that no-follow links can still improve your rankings — just perhaps not to the same degree that do-follow links would.

4. Use 1 Hour a Week to Build Relationships

This one doesn’t directly impact your SEO, but it does get people to know you’re a real estate investor in the area.

A good rule of thumb is to designate at least one hour every week to doing nothing but engaging with people. That engagement can be online or offline, but for local SEO, it’s probably best that it be with people in your community.

This could be as simple as going to a coffee shop for an hour every week and talking with the people there so that you can build valuable relationships (bring business cards). Or you could join your city’s chamber of commerce and spend time with them every week.

Side-Note: For 4 years, I was in full-time ministry. My life was literally a series of going to coffee shops and spending time with people. I can’t fully articulate the power and depth of that time. You’ll be amazed at what you learn about people and how many friends you make in the community.

If you decide to spend that hour online, try to find out where local people spend their digital time. Is there a Facebook group that is active in your town where you could socialize? Or you could use the hour to scroll through your social media feed and comment on other people’s posts.

Whatever you decide, remember that this hour isn’t for selling anything, it’s simply to build lasting relationships in your community that will likely pay you off later.

Be Patient

When off-page SEO is up to bat, you need to be patient.

It takes time for Google to analyze your website and figure out who is linking to you and what kind of ranking they should assign you. It takes time for you to build the authority required for Google to rank you well. And it takes time to generate enough quality content that Google recognizes you as an expert in your field.

Be patient and keep grinding away with these 4 steps:
1. Know how you’re currently ranking.
2. Build citations.
3. Get backlinks.
4. Build relationships.
Over time, your rankings will increase.

To continue your SEO journey, check out our free keyword SEO Bible for Real Estate Investors
August 24, 2017
Direct Mail Strategy For Real Estate Investors [A Case Study With Our Clients]

Almost 2 months ago, we released our most successful direct mail blog post to date: “10 Tips for Sending Real Estate Direct Mail (with Examples).”

Given our reader’s interest in sending direct mail, we thought it would be appropriate to write a piece about what direct mail strategies are working for real estate investors.

And then we thought to ourselves, “Hey, we know a lot of real estate investors” (also known as all of our AMAZING clients).

So, we asked them what strategies they use when sending direct mail. This is a compilation of their techniques, results, and advice. Here’s what they’re doing.

Direct Mail Strategy For Real Estate Investors – A Case Study With Our Carrot Members

Frequency

Brad Chandler

Brad Chandler, real estate investor at Express HomeBuyers, sends direct mail to prospects once per month. To manage high volume, he splits their mailing list into groups and sends a batch of mail to one group each week.

This is a postcard that Brad sends to his list.

Front:

Express Homebuyers Direct Mail Postcard: Front

Back:

Express Homebuyers Postcard: Back

Daniel DiGiacomo

Daniel DiGiacomo, owner, and investor at Baltimore Wholesale Property, sends 10,000 pieces of direct mail every month. Additionally, he sends between 1,000 and 1,500 yellow letters each month. On the yellow letters, he has them designed to look as though they’re written by hand.

These are some pieces that Daniel sends regularly.

Baltimore Wholesale Property We Buy Houses Direct Mail Example #1

Baltimore Wholesale Property We Buy Houses Direct Mail Example #2

Baltimore Wholesale Property Direct Mail Letter Example #1

Baltimore Wholesale Property Direct Mail Letter Example #2

Response Rate

Emphasizing that direct mail is a numbers game, Brad said,

“Sending out a couple hundred postcards probably won’t get you a deal. We typically see response rates of 0.5%-1.5%. Our leads convert at around 3%.”

Those percentages aren’t uncommon in the direct mail world, with the average across all industries sitting at 4.25% for postcards.

Daniel has somehow surpassed the average response rate with his direct mail campaign. He see’s a 7%-10% response rate on his postcards and a 20% response rate on his yellow letters. Appropriately, Daniel claims that his success comes from choosing his mailing list wisely.

Build a Quality List

“List quality is the most important part of direct mail,”

says Daniel,

“I like to target absentee, out of state owners that are likely older (55 and up).”

As for Brad’s list, his data suggests that the best performers are homeowners with 70% and higher equity, out-of-state homeowners, and probate.

Also worthy of note, Brad says,

“Response rates will be highest when you first mail a list. There will be a lot of people asking to be removed from mailings. As you continue to mail the list, response rates will decrease but you will get high quality leads.”

Quality Leads

Edward Beck

As a tip, real estate investor Edward Beck, from Quick Sell Buyers explains why quality leads are more important than quantity of leads.

He says,

“The main difference I have from all the others is that my stuff is honest and not smoke and mirrors.”

He believes that honesty matters to prospects today, because, in the marketing world, they see so little of it.

“I’m not leading the seller to believe I’m going to pay full price or that they would get a better deal not having a middle man (agent). I believe this is the biggest shortcoming with other mail pieces.”

Indicating that dishonest marketing techniques bring in low-quality leads, he continues,

“Yes they will have a higher response rate but when they make an offer the sellers are in a different frame of mind… The market is flooded with [dishonesty] and I believe [prospects] can smell it.”

Test & Iterate

As with all marketing, testing is key. When it comes to direct mail, you can test the copy, the images, and the style of the postcard.

For A/B testing, Brad explains that sticking with a single postcard makes it a whole lot easier to test accurately.

“We think it is smarter to stick with one postcard. The reason is that sticking to one postcard makes it easier to A/B test new ideas.”

But it’s not just testing that counts. It’s the application of the test’s findings that really makes the difference. On this, Brad says,

“We continuously iterate our copy and design to improve the conversion rate of the winning postcard.”

Supplemental Marketing

Don’t forget to follow up your direct mail campaigns with Facebook Ads, phone calls, and whatever outreach is appropriate.

Having several marketing touch points is critical with direct mail. As Brad explains,

“When you target prospects through direct mail, you also want to target them on other marketing channels. To do this, make sure you get emails and phone numbers with your lists. Have VA’s call the prospects right after the mail is delivered. Also, upload your lists onto Facebook as custom audiences spend some money running Facebook ads to your mail lists.”

What Do You Do?

Hearing what other real estate marketers are doing with their direct mail campaign is helpful. So don’t let the conversation stop here. Brad, Daniel, and Edward made generous and transparent contributions to this piece.

Do you agree with them? Disagree?

What does your direct mail strategy look like and what kind of results are you getting?

Let us know in the comments. :-)

June 29, 2017

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