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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”?

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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.

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February 14, 2018
EP 81: 2017 Carrot Year-End Review – Looking Back On An Accomplished Year
As with 2016, 2017 was a banner year here at Carrot and our customers. Here’s a brief snapshot of some great things that happened in 2017.

It was an exceptional year for our Carrot members and another year of HUGE growth for our team and company. With the intention of amplifying our members and “Add humanity back to business and help people regain more precious time for the things that matter in life.”

Let’s recap some of the cool stuff in this quick post!

Watch the CarrotCast 2017 Recap with Trevor and Chris

Listen to the CarrotCast 2017 Recap with Trevor and Chris

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2017 Carrot Year-End Review

Carrot members crushed lead generation

9 awesome new features released

The CarrotCast Podcast continues to inspire

Customer Success team worked their tails off

Our team grew (again) and continues to be the innovators of our industry

… and more!

Here we go!

Hundreds Of Thousands Of Leads … You’re Crushing It!

You guys made another forceful charge in 2017. With over 270,000 leads coming in this year (when you DON’T count phone call leads… which we can’t track in Google Analytics currently) you’re pulling in more PPC, SEO, and social media online leads as a collective group than any other real estate investor lead generation platform… by far. Keep crushing it!

52% via Mobile Devices

Which States Converted More Leads? Well…

9 Major NEW Features Launched

Carrot Keyword Ranking Tracking

Another Core Value of ours is “Consistent Improvement and Innovation“… and both our members and Carrot continued to push this value. In addition to the features, we released in 2017 to help our clients spend less time hassling and time more time focusing on their business …

New Innovative Features we rolled out in 2017 include (but not limited to)…
- Advanced marketer plan
- Keyword ranking tracking
- Stats V2
- Lead manager sessions (merging)
- App cluster upgrades (hosting)
- AgentCarrot
And here’s one of the coolest/most effective marketing features for our members that we launched just last week …

Check It Out: Carrot VideoPost Transcription

Carrot’s VideoPost Feature – Turn Your Videos Into SEO Content In Minutes…

Enjoy :-)

We’re Building a Following for the CarrotCast Podcast

We had many amazing comments about the CarrotCast come through our Awesomeness channel this year. Here’s just a couple …

I’m hooked on CarrotCast! The latest interview with the entrepreneur from Germany… was pure awesomeness. A lot of helpful tips about real estate as well as good advice on balancing family life. Keep up the great work!
Tucker C

P.S. you’ve built a great company, you should be very proud. I listen to your carrotcast pods and really appreciate what you guys do. Nice to have a customer focused company in the industry, and your culture is admirable. Cheers!
William W

Top 10 CarrotCast Episodes of 2017

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EP 56: [Case Study] From Junior High School Teacher to $80k/Month Investor in a Competitive Market. How Brian Rockwell Uses Patience and Planning for His Success

It’s awesome because once you know the formula of how to do this, its just do it again and keep going and going and see how you can grow it.
Brian Rockwell

EP 31: Facebook Marketing Tips for Real Estate Investors + Agents w/ Kiley Newbold

Your first month of online marketing typically is going to be one of your hardest and least productive because you’re really cutting new trail everywhere you go.
Kiley Newbold

EP 43: An SEO Master Breaks Down How He Closes 2-3 Real Estate Deals A Month From SEO In A Competitive Market w/ Dave Brown

I knew from my background that once I did the work, it would keep returning a benefit to me over and over again. Today, I’m reaping the rewards.
David Brown

EP 47: Flipping Vacant Land: How Gary Horton Pivoted His Wholesaling Business In A Tough Market To Be On Track To Flip 100 Pieces Of Bare Land In 2017

When you’re confident with whatever it is, you expect the result. You’re not hoping for it – you expect it. So you can say “hey, here’s what we’re going to do and you can just lead.” I think when you’re starting out, your confidence is more like you’re not sure what to do, and I think that is picked up on.
Gary Horton

EP 34: Bandit Sign Wars, Door Hangers, and Scaling With Online Marketing w/ Edward Beck

Within that first year I got more leads, 10x more leads, on the InvestorCarrot website, even before it was outranking the other website.
Edward Beck

EP 35: Hiring A Rock Star Executive Assistant – Resources, Tools, Mindset Shifts, and more w/ Adrian Nez and Trevor Mauch

If you want to stay busy in life but never accomplish anything, then stay busy. But if you really want to accomplish and be productiive, then you need to make that investment and find help.
Adrian Nez

EP 30: My 2017 Predictions For Real Estate Lead Generation In 2017 w/ Trevor Mauch

During times when the real estate marketing is going good, don’t lose your focus on the business fundamentals. Feasting and blindly following a business path can lead to destruction.
Trevor Mauch

EP 57: How to Achieve Financial Freedom and Build True Wealth w/ Jack Bosch

We don’t work just to accumulate money. We work so we can live… Most people forget that.
Jack Bosch

EP 36: What’s Your Credibility Score? The Top 5% Of Earners Are Doing These “Simple? Things To Build More Credibility In A Cluttered Market w/ Trevor Mauch

Create a connection with credibility and working hard to go the extra mile to show you’re an expert in your market.
Trevor Mauch

EP 37: Focus on Building a Long-Term Future in Real Estate While Avoiding Short-Term Tactics w/ Ryan Fletcher

Anything that’s worth doing is worth sucking at, first. I think that’s a Gary Halbert think that he said. And, you don’t start writing and immediately build an audience. It takes time. I tell everybody, if you won’t write for one then you won’t write for a 1000.
Ryan Fletcher

Over 500 “Doses Of Awesomeness” From Clients
Changing Their Businesses And Lives!

We LOVE those! And those are just the ones we get each week… not counting the hundreds that happen that we never hear about!

The Carrot Support Team sends out an email chat every 45 seconds.

World-Class Net Promoter Score

One of the most effective ways to gauge the happiness of your customers and how good or bad you’re doing with the “Net Promoter Score”. It’s basically a question that asks how likely you are to recommend Carrot to a friend or colleague. With hundreds of responses in 2017 the majority scored us a 9 or 10… leaving us with an impressive NPS of 69.1%.

Now to put that into perspective… here is what some of the most respected companies in the world have scored for their NPS:

As part of our core set of values, we’ll continue to strive in 2018 to make our clients excited, happy, and successful, and to change the way people expect companies to serve them in the future after they experience the service the “Carrot Way”.

We Added Over 1400 New Subscribers and Accumulated Over 114,000 Views and Climbing!

Two Carrot Team Retreats + Growing Our Team…

CarrotCamp 2017!

CarrotCamp was unlike most events. It wasn’t a workshop or seminar, nor was it a retreat. It was an immersive experience where we did a deep dive into the campers world. We unplugged and got out of the office and into nature, and worked with our team to get massive things done to uplevel marketing… all the while building relationships with other high-level real estate entrepreneurs that will hopefully last a lifetime.

Campers Edward Beck, Jeff Milligan, Tang Nguyen, Tim Oppelt, and Kyle Doney discuss what they enjoyed, struggled with, and how Camp benefited them both personally and in their businesses.

Thank you again 2017 CarrotCampers!

Be on the lookout for CarrotCamp 2018 Editions …

We Launched Agent Carrot

RunnerUp In The Oregon Entrepreneur Network
“Entrepreneur Achievement Award” 2017 and a Portland Business Journal 40 under 40 Finalist

Source: Portland Business Journal: 2017 Forty Under 40 Awards

What An Amazing Year. And We’re Grateful To Have You On This Journey With Us.

How Was Your Year?

So, how was your 2017? Let us know below in the comments section. The amazing, the fair, and the awful :-)
Also… fire up your 2018 and get momentum building?

These 2 resources are the most shared and commented we’ve ever made. They can change your life…
- How A Pumpkin Farmer Changed My Perspective On Life And Business
- Make 2018 Your Best Year Yet! – Planning An Epic Year. Join us LIVE Thursday, December 28th @ 11:00 AM Pacific (2:00 Eastern)
Thank you for all you do and for inspiring us every day to do great things.

Chat with you in 2018!
December 26, 2017
NEW: Announcing VideoPost – Turn Your Videos Into SEO Content In Minutes…
This blog post took us 80% LESS time to create than a normal blog post… because we did it with the assistance of Carrot’s new VideoPost tool. See what VideoPost is, and how it can be a game-changer for your content marketing in 2017.

We’re insanely excited to announce a brand new feature. We’ve actually been using this process to cut our content marketing time down by 80%, increase our traffic, and help our clients do the same.

I’m going to walk you through this new feature that we call VideoPost, what it helps you do, and how we came up with this content marketing method to automate and make your life simpler.

Introducing Carrot’s Automatic Video Transcription… VideoPost’s

VideoPost helps you turn simple videos into powerful written content that Google loves in just minutes vs. hours. 3/4 of this blog post was created with our VideoPost feature, saving us over 60 minutes vs. writing manually. Let’s dive in to see how you can start using VideoPost today.

(click to play video, OR read the article below)

VideoPost came about by us trying to solve our own problem a year and a half ago.

As you know, it takes time to sit down and craft content or it takes money to hire it out to have someone else do it. Content and SEO are our number one source of leads here at Carrot, but it’s also the number one source of leads for our Carrot clients.

We know that content marketing is effective in the real estate market, but can we put out great content with less time and energy?

So we asked the question…

How do we make it so it’s so simple and easy that you want to do content every single week?”

Especially when you’re in competitive markets, one of the best ways to crack through that clutter and to gain an advantage is to build credibility and your expertise.

And the best way to do that is through content, except most people don’t have the time to do written content.

VideoPost Simplifies All Of That For You – An Example: G. Stiles Realty

G. Stiles is the largest independent broker in Douglas County, Oregon… and an AgentCarrot client. See how they used VideoPost to streamline their content marketing…

Let’s say you’re in a small town like Roseburg, Oregon. This is actually one of our AgentCarrot client’s G. Stiles, and they were having a tough time with their content marketing strategy as well.

We went to them and we said…

“Hey, go out on site and film a short 3-8 minute video walking people through some information that’s going to help them and be useful for them in that scenario.”

One of their specialties is in farmland and in some other agricultural-type properties, so they went there, filmed the video, and then uploaded it to YouTube.

We then had the video transcribed word for word and made a blog post for them (this was before our VideoPost feature, so it took a bit longer).

Here’s Denny’s Three And A Half Minute “On The Job Content” Video

He recorded it of him on the farmland giving tips and talking about buying farmland in Roseburg, Oregon.

We Then Turned The Video Into A Content Rich Article That Google Loves

This particular example was long before we created VideoPost to automate the process.

We then manually submitted it to a transcription service, brought it back, copied and pasted it into their blog, bolded a couple of things for readability, separated some of the paragraphs, put a link in there, and then we put a clear call to action at the end of it.

Less than five minutes of editing in total. About 30-45 minutes to submit the video for transcription, pay for it, get it back in a Word document, bring it to their Carrot site, and manually remove the weird formatting that can come from copying and pasting content from Word documents. (again, today, VideoPost automates most of this and brings the process down to less than 5 minutes).

Then we used our SEO tools here in Carrot to make sure it was optimized for search engines for the phrase “buying farmland in Roseburg, Oregon” and all related phrases in the area.

The Results?

Within weeks, this blog post started to climb in the rankings.

As of the time I recorded this video, their blog post from this process is ranking over big websites like LandWatch, and Land and Farm, and Zillow, and LoopNet, and Realtor.com, all from a little piece of short video content.

Now, is this particular search getting tons and tons of searches per month? The answer is of course not, but as a part of a cohesive strategy to really go in there and swarm and dominate your market, you want to be going after the most competitive search phrases of course, but also you want to cast a wider net with these more niched down search phrases.

If you do just one video post per week, over the course of a year that’s going to be 52 new pages on your website to potentially rank in front of your best prospects.

You will cast a wider net out there to grab more searches, build more expertise in your market, become the leading expert in that market to where everyone knows, likes, and trusts because they see your information everywhere they go.

How Do We Automate This And Make It Simpler With VideoPost?

It takes under 3 minutes to create a VideoPost in your Carrot account, then edit it as much or as little as you want (we suggest basic edits to make it visually more easy to read with sub heads, that’s it!). If you’re a Carrot member already simply…

1. Log in to your Carrot website and click “New Post”, then VideoPost…

2. Confirm the transcription purchase and click Start Transcription!

By automating your transcriptions into our VideoPost format, it saves you 15-45 minutes vs. having to manually use transcription services. If you value your time at just $100/hr… that time savings alone is worth $25 – $50 to you. If you value your time higher, your savings are even larger.

The average VideoPost should be 3 – 8 minutes long, meaning a cost of only $3.75 – $10 per content piece. Compare that to $30 – $75 to outsource to a writer, VideoPosts are a huge time savings and direct money savings every time you use it.

3. Within 24 hours (usually within several hours) your VideoPost is complete and ready to publish

Once your VideoPost is complete, with your transcription added, your post created in our VideoPost format (title, intro paragraph, video, transcription, and call to action)… we’ll email you your new post for review and you can then make any edits to the post you want. No more logging into transcription services and copying & pasting transcriptions… that’s a waste of time. VideoPost does it all for you.

How To Get Extra SEO Juice From Your VideoPost

How well Google ranks your VideoPost depends greatly on the content in the video and the small quick tweaks you can make inside of each VideoPost.

To make sure to squeeze all the on-page SEO juice out of this VideoPost here are a few things you can do…
- Make sure when you’re recording your video, you know which types of searches you want to go after in Google… then use those words in the video. If you’re going after “Portland Oregon river homes”… you’ll want to make sure to say those words. You have to remember to say the things that you’re showing in your video.
- Go through and format the post so it’s nice and easy for a user to read (this will help with bounce rate). No one wants to read a wall of text.
- Find some key areas to add <h2> and <h3> tags.
- Can you link to other content you have done on your site?
- Make sure to include a call to action at the end (how do they contact you if they have questions or want an offer?)
And last… make sure to use our Carrot SEO Tool to dial in the content for a specific search phrase.

Dial in the SEO on your VideoPosts with the Carrot SEO Tool whether you’re an SEO expert or not.

VideoPost vs. Manually Using Transcription Services

When we were doing this process the manual way… we submitted it to a service called Rev.com, then we had to manually do every other step to get the content from Rev.com into our blog editor. This still took us 30-45 minutes to do. Yes, better than 1-2 hours to write an article, but still too long for most people to fit in on a weekly basis.

Now, with the VideoPost feature, this is only going to take you as much time as it does to film your video, log into your Carrot account, paste in a URL, and click a button – we do the rest.

We go out and get the transcription and then notify you when the transcription’s inside of your account ready and formatted in our special “VideoPost” format.

VideoPost Automatically Structures Your Content Flow Properly

Once our system gets the transcription of your video back, we automatically build it into our VideoPost format for you. First, your SEO optimized blog post title, then a short summary of the video, next your video, the transcription, then a simple call to action. All automatic.

This step alone will save you 10-15 minutes. What will you do with that extra time? Get a workout in? Call a prospect and land a deal? Meditate on the day and get clarity? You can do whatever the heck you want while VideoPost does that part of your content creation for you.

How Much Will You Save With VideoPost? And What Can You ADD To Your Marketing Efforts?

VideoPost will enable you to do more content, do more robust content, get your brand, your face, your content in front of your prospects so you build up that expertise with your market.

It’s going to save you hundreds of dollars per month when you just do one blog post per week.

I’m predicting for this next year that those people who are out front building their expertise and building their credibility with content are the ones that are going to win the game in a competitive market.

If you do one video post per week, that’s 52 new pages on your website over this next year.

That’s 52 new chances to cast a wider net to get in front of your prospects. Every single time your prospects search different things in your real estate market… like “buying farmland in Roseburg, Oregon”, they’re going to see you over and over again. It’s going to add up in their mind that…

“Man, this person, this company is a really reputable company, they’re an expert.”

Not Sure What To Make Videos About?

That’s the easy part. You’re already creating hours of content every single day… you’re just not documenting it so others can get value from it. But here are some ideas…
- On The Job Content – next time you’re out in the field, whip out your cell phone and document the situations you’re in, and answer your prospects questions
- Here is a list of 101 blog post ideas that you can make a video around
- Testimonials – ask a recent seller or buyer to allow you to film them and ask them about the process
- Case Study – this is similar to a testimonial but maybe you just talk through the process
- Market Trends & Updates – find a report online and share your expertise or opinion about it on video
- About Us – make a video about how your company was started and who you want to work with
At the end of the day, just be useful and valuable for the people that you can best help. Answer their common questions in videos, educate them on things they’re searching for, and have fun with it!

Now it’s time for you to dig in and launch your first VideoPost!

Not a Carrot client yet? Head over to our Plans page and pick the Carrot plan that best fits your goals.

Already a Carrot client? Sweet! The VideoPost feature is ready to use… just hop into your Carrot account and put it to use!

As you dive in and use VideoPost, please send us feedback on ways we can make it even better. There are things on our roadmap already for adding more power and simplicity to VideoPost, so we’re excited to make this one of the most useful tools in your content marketing arsenal in this next year.
December 21, 2017
EP 74: How April Acquired 40+ Units and Flips 10+ Houses Per Year in Pennsylvania w/ April Crossley

Listen to the CarrotCast Podcast and Subscribe Below!

Sellers will call and say you know I have 10 letters on my desk. So of those 10 letters what makes you stand out? How are you personalizing that letter? And, how are you connecting with that seller like no one else is? That’s what I think about when I create my marketing. April Crossley

April Crossley has almost been with Carrot from the beginning. April shares how she has grown her business and made the leap into real estate full-time after leaving a high-paying medical career.

She also reveals how she’s now built up her portfolio of rental properties to dozens of properties. Also, find out her direct mail strategy and how she leverages her online real estate investing with Carrot to amplify her business.

Listen, enjoy, and check out more CarrotCast episodes at carrotcast.com.

Listen to the CarrotCast Podcast

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Listen in to learn how April combines her online real estate investing with direct mail to acquire 40 + units and 10+ flips per year.

1:15 – Who is April Crossley? Where is her real estate investing business located, and what does her team look like?
4:15 – Breaking down her whiteboard notes and schedule structure. How she stays on task.
8:15 – What was that “aha” moment when she decided to shift from a high-level healthcare career to real estate investing?
14:00 – Viewing risk differently. How April sees risks differently than most people. Also, how long it took for her to feel safe to leave her job?
18:00 – If she had kept her medical license, would she have slipped back into that career?
20:00 – Breaking down her business model. What does her mix of rentals and flips look like right now, and why does she have that strategy?
24:40 – In a competitive market, where is she finding her properties? Online and offline?
25:50 – April’s direct mail strategy. What types of messages does she put in her letters? She gets creative and puts much thought into the message and design.
33:35 – How she builds credibility with her prospects.
38:45 – What made her feel like she needed a web presence? How is having a website helping her investing business?
41:20 – Why building credibility in real estate is so important.
45:10 – What she is seeing from her online leads. Has she seen a difference in quality or closure rate between her online vs. offline leads?
46:45 – How did she get such high SEO rankings, and what was involved in that process?
49:05 – What advice would she give to a student who has decided to start investing but is very hesitant? How would she get them to push through?
51:45 – What advice would she give someone who needs to start a website for online real estate investing?

Find more about April Crossley on Facebook @Lazy Girl Real Estate Investing

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November 14, 2017
4 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate From a 10,000 Foot View
There is a lot that goes into search engine optimization, but in actuality, there’s only really a few things that will move the lever for you. The things that will be important and help you get results. That’s what we’re going to focus on in this post.

We’re trying to give you the action items and the understanding of how it works and what you need to do to actually get results.

Watch the Video or Read the Post Below

From a 10,000-foot Point of View, What’s the Most Important Part of SEO?

First of all, there are four main parts of SEO. This introduction is all about really getting your head around what SEO is, how it works if you really want to learn the craft of SEO.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #1: URL

First of all, you’ve got what’s called the URL factors. The URL is your domain name. That’s things like how long your domain name has been owned by you. How long the website’s been up online. Those are things that matter. The site structure of the website. Is the website set up correctly with your URL?

That’s something we’ve already built into Carrot. If you have a website outside of Carrot, that’s something you might be concerned about.

There’s a bunch of other things, like site structure, like I said, domain lifespan, search engine friendly URLs. All of that stuff except for domain lifespan is built into Carrot to make your life easier. As your website stays online longer, it ages, and Google likes it.

Here’s a screenshot of a website.

Klamathfallsapartments.net. That’s the URL. I have owned that domain for several years, and if I was to go up a different website that Google felt was very similar as far as optimized in content, and my URL was owned for let’s say 10 years, and this one was brand new, I would definitely get a boost and some sort of credit for having a domain that has been owned and up and online longer.

The longer that you own the domain, the more authority that Google will feel that your website potentially has.

That’s one factor to always keep in your mind. That if you just purchased a domain, and you’re just attaching it to a new website, you’re going up against other websites that have been around for longer. We can definitely accelerate the process of ranking well using what we’re going to teach you, but some part of the equation may be that your domain might just need to age a little bit to get that ranking up.

Be patient with some of the things. Make sure that you recognize that if you’re not seeing your ranking crack through and you’re doing everything else right, and your website is new, it may be domain age is part of it.

You want to keep a nice, simple URL structure. That’s a good thing. Complicated is a bad thing. This is the way that we have it built out in our Carrot websites already, so if you’re a member, you don’t have to worry about this. If you’re not a member, if you have another website platform or you built one yourself, this is something you’re going to want to pay attention to.

A simple URL structure will be something like:
- yoursite.com/sell-my-atlanta-house, or
- yoursite.com/how-it-works.
On the flip side, something that’s complicated that Google doesn’t like is too many forward slashes in your URL:
- your-site.com/sell/sellingyourhouse/boston
That’s just not a very friendly URL.

Google doesn’t like that as much. Or having weird characters in your URL:
- yoursite.com/?p25235
Google can’t determine what that’s about. In Carrot, we’ve already made it simple for you. You don’t have to do anything at all to make your URL simple.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #2: On-Page SEO for Real Estate

The second thing is on-page. On-page SEO are things on your website that you can physically see on the page. Content, pictures, things like that, and how they’re structured. In on-page, really, for your website, it’s kind of like soil for a farmer. On-page for SEO is like soil for the farmer.

If you don’t have good soil and you’re planting a crop, there’s no way that that crop is going to grow very good. On the flip side, if you don’t have the on-page optimization done on your website for SEO, it’s going to be very, very hard to rank well for any keyword phrases, no matter what you’re doing on the back end. The on-page is where it starts. It’s the fertile soil to grow a great crop.

If you don’t have fertile soil with the right nutrients and minerals, you can’t grow a good crop.

Make sure that the on-page optimization is correct. With Carrot members, once again, we give you a jump start. The content that’s already built into your website is already optimized very, very well. We suggest you go in there and tweak it, customize it to yourself, and use the SEO tool built into our system on each page to ensure it retains its SEO grade for the keyword you’re going after.

Part of on-page is content relevance. Let’s say someone is looking for a rent to own home in Birmingham, and your website doesn’t say those words anywhere on your website, but that’s what you’re looking for. How is Google going to know that your content is relevant to that search phrase?

You need to make sure that your content talks about the same things that you’re trying to optimize and rank well for.

Is it high-quality content, or are you just throwing up a few words here and there and moving on? You need to make sure that you have high-quality content on there … It’s robust content. It’s good. It’s valuable and also addresses the keywords and the things that your person, whether they’re a tenant, buyer, or seller, is typing in.

Be sure to have very relevant keywords for search phrases that you know your prospects are typing in in your market. We just suggest you dive in and tweak it up to make it more relevant to you, more relevant to your business model, to you as a person. And, build some credibility in there.

Also, to help make it more relevant in Google’s eyes, we’ve got the Carrot SEO tool. With the Carrot SEO tool, you can tell the platform and you can tell Google what to look at.

With this, if you’ve identified that you want to rank for rent to own homes in Birmingham, AL, you put it in the focus keyword section. You make sure that keyword phrase is in the SEO title, as you can see it is, and you make sure it’s in the description down there below.

What that does, that keys Google into the fact that that’s what that web page is about. It makes it very relevant in Google’s eyes that that web page is likely about rent to own homes in Birmingham, Alabama.

This is a huge factor.

We make it easier for you with Carrot, and we also give you the SEO tool to make sure that you’re following along. Whether you’re an SEO expert or not, you’re going to be able to optimize your pages very well with our built-in SEO tool.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #3: Choosing the Right Real Estate Keywords

Then next, with the SEO tool, are your keywords used right? Your pages should really have a good mix of your keyword phrases and pictures and structure so Google has the information they need to know your site is very relevant. That’s what we’re talking about here, guys.

This isn’t rocket science.

What we’re looking for is we just want to make sure that the content on the page is relevant to the search phrase that we’re trying to rank for. If we’re trying to rank for note sellers in California or note buyers in California, we want to make sure that the content on that page talks about your note buying service in California, and it has some pictures about that, and your title tag in our SEO tool and your description has those keywords in it. Very, very relevant. Use our SEO tool to help guide you along to make sure you’re staying relevant.

Then like I said, the website structure. Is the website structured right? This is something you don’t have to worry about. If you did not have Carrot, you would have to worry about this, but we worry about how fast your website loads. We worry about all the things behind the scenes in the code.

You do not have to touch it. That alone should make you rest easy at night knowing that you never have to touch this or reach out to a web person and have them do it. Get the on-page parts right, and it makes it much easier to grow a great crop. Bad on-page equals a thin crop. We all want to eat well. We all want to have a great crop.

So now off-page SEO. Off-page basically is everything … It’s kind of obvious, but everything that is away from your pages. What we’re talking about here is off-page stuff that’s kind of like water and the fertilizer for a farmer. You’ve got this soil. You’re hoping to plant something.

Now you’ve got to take something that’s outside of that environment of the soil and put it on the soil to help it grow the seed. It takes that fertile soil, and it adds the extra boost that it needs to grow.

Without watering, without fertilizing a crop, it’s going to be really hard to make it grow well.

One way that you can water and fertilize your website is with backlinks. Backlinks are basically where one website has a link on their website that’s clickable that goes over to your website. Google looks at it as a vote of confidence that your website is a good website according to that one. When other quality websites link to your website, Google really likes that.

Also, your footprint matters. What I mean by footprint is if you just have a website up there, and you’re really looking to dominate in your market, if you only have your website up there and that’s all you’re doing, Google doesn’t really have a whole lot to go off of to see if you’re a legitimate company.

One thing that they look at is your footprint. Do you have other entities, other websites or other social media profiles online, that also link to your website, that also has your company name in it?

They also have your address in it, your phone number in it? So set up a Google Business profile.

Go to YouTube and set up a YouTube profile and get a few videos in there. Go set up some business directories or citations, which we’re going to teach you how to do citations in a later module. Make sure you’re not just using a website only.

Go out there and make sure your footprint is wider and you have your business listed and profiles claimed on other websites.

SEO Ranking Factors for Real Estate #4: Social Media

The fourth part is social factors. You can see here is a screenshot of the bottom of a website where it’s got Google My Business, Facebook likes, and things like that. Google is really looking at the social factors of your website.

They look at that as votes kind of. They figure, well, if someone was on this website and they clicked the Facebook like button or engage with your Google Business content that must be a good thing.

That must be a vote that that person likes the website. We’re going to say that if a website has consistent and good “votes”, then it must be high quality and relevant. They’re going to reward you with a higher search result out of that.

Growing Your SEO

Those are the four main parts, guys. You’ve got the URL factors, which is really the ground. That’s the ground. You’ve got the on-page stuff, which is really the soil. That’s the soil. You’ve got the … The off-page stuff is your water. That’s your fertilizer. Then the social stuff is just kind of good juju. That’s just good stuff, good mojo, to help with everything else.

Next, what we’re going to dive into on the next video is the timeline to expect search engine rankings, to expect results and how to effectively guess what you can expect as far as how long it’s going to take to get results in your market, so let’s see you in the next video.
October 19, 2017
Real Estate Marketing Online: How to Rule With SEO In Competitive Markets [Whiteboard]

Transcript

Are you operating in a really competitive market like a Houston or a Dallas or just a large market where there’s a lot of competition? Well, a lot of our clients are and every single week we do coaching calls on every Tuesday at 11 o’clock Pacific time for our care customers who are in content pro membership or above.

And one of the main questions we get on a really consistent basis is, “Man, I’m in a crazy, competitive market. There’s a lot of other investors, investing there, and there’s a lot of other care clients there. Can I crack through it and how do I do it?

The first answer is, “100% yes, you can.” That sounds like a political stump that I just did there, yes you can, yes you can do it, we have clients every single day who are going out there implementing the plan we lay out on these whiteboard strategy sketches, on our coaching calls in our training’s and in, through support and they follow these methods I’m going to show you to get that result. So I want you to know that it can be done, but you gotta follow this to a T and don’t come complaining to me if it doesn’t work if you don’t do these.

Online Real Estate Marketing in Competitive Markets

OK, so here we go. So if you’re in a competitive market I’m gonna be kind of walking you through, how do you get in that search result for search engine optimization but also just in search in general, to get those consistent stream of leads coming in to fuel your business because when you’re in a large market like that you really can go deep in that market like we’ve talked about in other whiteboard strategy sketches you can go deep, and you can focus just in that market for the first year and get 30-40-50-60 leads a month if you really hit it hard, okay? And that can fuel your entire business 2-4-5-6-10 deals a month if you do it right.

OK? So we want to get you here first of all, and we want to get you there through paid and through SEO in the competitive market. It’s going to be really hard to get really consistent, and a lot of momentum with just SEO okay? PPC is great, but you can stack on SEO to really add momentum over that year and this is kind of what we want to do.

We’ve done a whiteboard Strategy Sketch on this exact topic before go check out youtube, go to YouTube.com and then go look up InvestorCarrot, find our channel, the first thing you need to do is subscribe to our channel the second thing you need to do is go search our channel for a video I think it’s called the 90-day marketing plan or something like that where we layout in a lot more detail what you should do in the first 90 days in any market to have leads coming in and to set yourself in a really, really solid foundation, okay? But we’re gonna give an abbreviated version of that today.

So you’ve got here, and you’ve got twelve months out there and if you’re in a large market the first thing you need to do is we need to know that it’s going to take time, and we need to have a lot of patience, okay? Because with SEO, search engine optimization large market, it’s probably going to take you between 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 plus months to really get that momentum to get that ranking that’s going to get those leads to start trickling in and then start coming in more.

I was talking to one of our clients yesterday, Martin, out of Phoenix, Arizona and he’s flipping a lot of houses, okay? Ten plus houses a month and when we were talking, you know a year ago he joined Carrot a little over a year ago he was in a very competitive market, he wanted to get some more organic traffic coming in, he was turning on PPC as well, but we’re like, you know what? I think that there’s going to be a great chance for you to crack into this market from a website that had never ranked in the top three pages of the main seller search phrases to what it is today getting really consistent leads, and he’s in top one-two-three rankings in google for the most competitive search phrases in Phoenix, how did he do that? The first thing, like I said, locked, and then it’s gonna take time, and he knew it, and he knew that he was going to have to be patient okay?

Choosing Your Top Keywords

The second thing, is we need to go out there and choose the top keywords, so what are those top keywords that are likely going to give us 70% or more of that traffic? For house sellers it’s likely your cash for homes, sell my house fast, insert city, we buy houses, insert city, there are a few others, just go to carrot.com/seo-bible, and you can check it out, we have a full report there that goes through all of the top motivated house seller keyword phrases for SEO, and you can check it out. If you’re doing pay per click go to carrot.com/ppc-keywords and oncarrot.com/seo-bible, and you can find both those reports where we give you all of the keywords based on our research, so we solved that one for you.

Alright but the first thing that we always like to do in a market, in a really competitive market is we’ve got to get leads coming in right now okay? If we don’t have leads coming in right now and it’s gonna take us 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 months to start to get the real traffic to get traction and get deals in that market it becomes really, really discouraging, you know none of us want to be discouraged on our journey to grow our business or start our business so get pay per click going right away, okay?

PPC Marketing

In that first month to two months and it you don’t know how to do PPC we have a lot of resources on our blog you can check it out at oncarrot.com forward slash blog, or we have guides and resources and checklists on how to do it and we also talk about it all the time in our coaching calls if you are a carrot customer, and our three lead per day training okay also during that same time period during the first month to three months, in a competitive market the biggest thing we need to focus on is, how do you stand out from your competitors, how is it that your clients are going to chose you versus the 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 25, 30 other investors that are also vying for their business?

The people that sent them that direct-mail piece, the people that have the bandit signs up in their neighborhood the people that are in the same rankings, the same paid search results that you’re competing for. Even if you get there, even if you get right here, and you don’t take care of the credibility piece then you’re not gonna win the game, the other people are going to win the game okay? So focus on that as a core strategy, what is your credibility score?

Building Credibility

We have a CarrotCast episode, which is our weekly podcast, just go to CarrotCast.com, and you can go directly to the CarrotCast to find our episode on credibility score. You can even go to Google and Google Investor Carrot credibility score or CarrotCast credibility score, you’re going to find that episode where we walk you through everything you need to do to ramp up your credibility whether you’re an experienced investor or brand new and set yourself apart. Also, we did a CarrotCast episode on USP, unique selling proposition, which in a competitive market that is a requirement, you’ve gotta have a unique selling proposition why people should choose to work with you versus someone else. Tackle those in the first three months.

Get your PPC up and going, get leads coming in in the first several weeks get your first deal in the first month or two, and then during that time you’re setting up your SEO foundation the first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven months in a competitive market you’re likely going to get no leads so prepare for that mentally, okay?

Consistency Wins the Game

But after you start implementing that plan consistently over those months you’re gonna see a bump, and you’re gonna see another bump, and you’re gonna see another bump and around that 10 to 12,10 to 14 month time period if you’re implementing SEO well you’re gonna start to see those results coming possibly even quicker, okay? We have some clients in our concierge traffic service, which is a high-end service that we do internally for clients that are closing a lot of deals that are in really competitive markets that we were able to crack through the top five in the first five to six months and now we’re working on getting through that top three, but they’re already getting SEO leads in the first five to six months, that doesn’t always happen, but it can happen okay?

So, make sure you’ve got that locked down in your mindset now if we’re going to go through on the SEO side of things in a competitive market here’s what we need to do, we need to go after the top keywords that are going to give you 70% of the traffic, go to those resources I mentioned before to find those keywords on PPC and SEO, okay then what we’re going to do next is expand locations immediately in that first one to three months at location-specific landing pages, We’ve done other whiteboard videos on this topic, and we teach in detail in our training if you’re a carrot customer in our blog we have a lot of free resources as well.

So launch about ten location-specific landing pages and what those are, if you’re in Dallas, but there’s Ft. Worth and there’s a lot of other cities around Dallas that are suburbs or surrounding cities that you would also buy house in, launch pages on your Carrot site or another site that are specific to that location for your primary keywords, okay? For your primary keywords. And get at least ten of those up because those are going to be easier to rank for thank that primary large market of Dallas or Portland that big market and those rankings are going to happen faster so as you’re working on your SEO those are going to climb faster, your primary markets gonna climb a little bit slower, and they’re gonna rise together.

Build Citations

Next, do your citations, okay? Go to our blog, carrot.com/blog we talk about citations. If you’re a Carrot customer we can do your citations for you in our marketplace so check out our marketplace but this sets the foundation for credibility for your website in that local market right here, optimize for your company name plus the word reviews ‘cuz if you’re doing pay per click, or you’re getting traffic, or you’re doing direct mail we need to make sure that you rank well for your company name when people are trying to research you to see if you’re legit, and you never want to lose any deals because someone googles that and then don’t find any good things about you okay?

So optimize your about page for company, company plus your reviews then go get a Better Business Bureau Profile pay that three – four-hundred bucks, whatever it is, and then drive your clients over there to do reviews and optimize it as well for this and that going to help you close more deals.

Social Signals

Next are social signals. Get five, ten, fifteen people to google plus your homepage and Facebook like it over the first two months, backlinks if you’re going to do your own SEO just grab for three to five backlinks a month it’s not a big deal, and we teach how to do this in blog posts, we teach how to do this in our coaching calls, and our three lead per day training, if you’re a member, has it very, very detailed okay?

If you’re not a client we don’t sell that to the open public yet but we will if you’re watching this video after I publish this video just go to carrot.com/3lpd, don’t do it right now because nothing exists but if you’re doing this for several months, go to carrot.com/3lpd, you can check it out.

PPC to Guide SEO

Last, use PPC, use your pay per click data to guide you on your SEO that’s one of the biggest mistakes people make in competitive markets, is they use their pay per click and their SEO in silos, what we always like to do is launch your PPC campaigns, find out the ones that are converting into leads and turning into deals the most and then go after those keywords in your SEO so use PPC to guide you.

I’m gonna wrap this up, fast follow-up is huge in that market, if you’re in a competitive market you need to be calling your leads back within minutes or answer them live. We’ve talked to many clients that as soon as they switch to answering their calls live from pay per click and SEO they started closing more deals okay? It’s a big deal.

Answer them live and if you’re a Carrot customer turn on your text message notifications where you get a text message notification within seconds of a lead coming in, you’ll have a phone number there you can tap the phone number, call them up fast follow-up’s gonna help you cut through in that market. And then last, have an abundance mindset okay? One thing we always love to do is, there’s enough for everyone. There’s enough to go around for everyone; leads, deals, success, abundance, share that with people in your market, don’t try to hold all of your secrets in, the more you share, honestly the more comes back to you. So have that abundance mindset.

Real Estate Marketing in Competitive Markets

Alright, you’re in the competitive market, use that as a blessing, it’s a great thing for you, don’t say, “oh my gosh I’m in this crazy competitive market it’s going to be hard.” It will be work, but there are amazing, amazing things for you on the other side of it. When you have the patience and time locked in your brain you have the plan and you’re working with the right team. Alright? Go after it, tackle it, check out our other episodes of Carrotcast go to carrotcast.com and our other carrot whiteboard strategies sketches on our youtube channel just subscribe right here, here wherever the heck it is. Subscribe to our channel and you get updates as soon as they come out.

Learn more on the Carrot YouTube channel and start growing your business by leveraging the web as a real estate professional!

September 7, 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
Real Estate Conversion Copywriting: How To Sell The “Click” With Your Meta Description And SEO Title
When it comes to online real estate marketing, your website’s visibility on search engines like Google can make or break your lead generation efforts. But visibility alone isn’t enough—you need to convince users to actually click on your listing in the search results. This is where your SEO title and meta description come into play.

These two elements are your first—and sometimes only—opportunity to make a strong impression. In just a few words, they have to convey the value you offer, speak directly to the needs of potential sellers or buyers, and drive them to take action. For real estate investors, who often rely on capturing the attention of motivated sellers, mastering this art can lead to a consistent stream of high-quality leads.

Why Meta Tags Matter in Real Estate

Meta descriptions and SEO titles are not just placeholders for keywords. They act as the “ad copy” for your search engine results. Well-written tags can directly influence Click-Through Rate (CTR), which is the percentage of users who click on your result when it appears on the search engine results page (SERP).

How Meta Tags Influence Click-Through Rates (CTR)
1. First Impression: Your SEO title and meta description are often the first things a potential lead sees. They set the tone for the user’s decision-making process. A compelling title can grab attention, while a clear, concise meta description can reassure users that your page has what they’re looking for.
2. Keyword Relevance: Search engines like Google bold the keywords in your title and description that match the user’s search query. This increases visibility and signals relevance, making it more likely that users will click on your listing over a competitor’s.
3. Trust and Transparency: A well-crafted meta description lets the user know what to expect when they click through. If they’re searching for “sell my house fast in ,” and your description promises a simple process with no fees, they’re more likely to feel confident that they’ve found a solution to their problem.
For real estate investors, your leads often come from sellers in distress or urgency, whether it’s due to foreclosure, repairs, or financial issues. The more targeted and reassuring your title and description are, the higher your chances of converting that curiosity into a lead.

What You’ll Learn

In this blog, we’ll break down the steps to craft high-converting SEO titles and meta descriptions that:
- Use relevant keywords without overstuffing.
- Appeal directly to the pain points and needs of motivated sellers and buyers.
- Include clear calls to action that drive clicks and leads.
- Reflect the local nature of your real estate business to attract the right audience.
By following these tactics, you’ll be able to create optimized meta tags that not only improve your search rankings but also increase CTR, leading to a steady stream of motivated leads ready to sell or invest in real estate. Let’s dive in!

Understanding SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions

What is an SEO Title?

An SEO title is the clickable headline of your webpage that appears on search engine results pages (SERPs). It serves two major purposes:
1. Telling search engines what your page is about.
2. Enticing users to click on your listing.
SEO titles are a crucial ranking factor because they give search engines important clues about the content of your page. However, they also play a pivotal role in determining your Click-Through Rate (CTR). A well-crafted title that aligns with a user’s search intent can convince them to choose your result over others, regardless of where it ranks.

For example, a user searching for “sell my house fast in ” is more likely to click a title that addresses their exact need, such as:

“Sell Your House Fast in | No Fees, No Hassles”

This title speaks directly to their problem and offers a solution upfront.

Connection Between SEO Titles, Rankings, and CTR

SEO titles influence rankings by incorporating target keywords that search engines use to understand your page’s relevance to a search query. While rankings are important, a high ranking without a compelling title won’t generate clicks. In the real estate investing space, where competition is fierce, your title must capture the urgency and pain points of motivated sellers to stand out.

For instance, a title like:

“We Buy Houses in Fast | Get a Cash Offer Today”

not only ranks well for keyword searches like “we buy houses,” but also appeals to homeowners who need to sell quickly.

How SEO Titles Are Shown on SERPs (Example)

Let’s look at an example of a real estate-related search:

Search Query: “Sell my house fast in Dallas”

SEO Title Example:
Sell Your House Fast in Dallas | No Repairs, No Fees, Cash Offers

This title uses important keywords—”Sell Your House Fast in Dallas”—while also offering solutions like “No Repairs, No Fees,” which address common seller concerns.

What is a Meta Description?

A meta description is the short snippet of text that appears under your SEO title on the SERP. While meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, they are incredibly important for influencing user behavior. A well-crafted meta description reassures potential leads that your page provides the solution they’re searching for, even if your ranking is lower on the page.

Meta descriptions should focus on being informative, clear, and action-driven. They can directly affect CTR, turning impressions into clicks.

Importance of a Well-Crafted Meta Description

Even if your ranking isn’t in the top spot, a compelling meta description can help you compete with higher-ranked pages. This is particularly important in real estate, where motivated sellers often choose the most convenient and promising option from the search results.

For example, consider these two meta descriptions for the same query:

Good Meta Description:

Need to sell your house fast in ? At we make cash offers and close in as little as 7 days.

This description is clear, concise, and offers a solution directly relevant to motivated sellers.

Bad Meta Description:
We buy houses. Contact us today for a free consultation about your property.

The second description lacks specificity and urgency and doesn’t differentiate the service.

How Search Engines Display Your SEO Title and Meta Description

Search engines display the SEO title and meta description as the first impression a user sees. If you optimize these two elements correctly, you increase the likelihood of driving clicks.

Here’s how they look on a SERP:

SEO Title Example:
Sell Your House Fast in | No Fees, Cash Offers in 24 Hours

Meta Description Example:
Need to sell your home quickly? We offer no-obligation cash offers in and can close in as little as 7 days. Contact us for a quick sale.

Word Limits for SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions
- SEO Titles: Should be kept between 50-60 characters. Any longer, and search engines may cut off part of your title.
- Meta Descriptions: Aim for 150-160 characters. This ensures your message is displayed in full without being truncated.
For real estate investors, keeping within these limits helps convey your message clearly and completely, increasing your chances of capturing clicks from motivated sellers.

By understanding how SEO titles and meta descriptions work together, you can better optimize your real estate website to attract more motivated leads and convert them into deals. Next, we’ll dive into how to actually craft these elements to maximize your online presence.

Section 2: Crafting a High-Converting SEO Title

An SEO title serves as the first point of contact between your website and a potential motivated seller. To maximize your click-through rate (CTR), you must create a title that not only includes relevant keywords but also speaks directly to your target audience’s needs and pain points. Here’s how to do it step-by-step.

Step 1: Keyword Research

Identify the Most Relevant Real Estate Keywords for Your Title

The first step to crafting a high-converting SEO title is conducting thorough keyword research. You need to find out exactly what your potential leads are typing into search engines when they’re looking to sell their homes. The goal is to identify keywords that not only align with your services but also attract motivated sellers in your target market.

How to find the best keywords:
1. Google Keyword Planner: A free tool that shows search volumes and keyword competition. Use this to discover terms such as “Sell my house fast in ” or “Cash home buyers in [market city].”
2. Carrot’s Keyword Explorer Tool: This tool helps you find real estate-specific keywords based on what’s already driving traffic for other Carrot users. It’s especially useful for uncovering long-tail keywords like “sell my inherited house fast in [market city].”
Real estate-specific keyword examples:
- Sell My House Fast in Dallas
- Cash Home Buyers in Austin
- Avoid Foreclosure in Minneapolis
The focus should be on finding keywords that both match search intent and address urgent needs, like selling a house quickly or getting a cash offer.

Step 2: Writing the SEO Title

Use of Primary and Secondary Keywords Without Keyword Stuffing

Once you’ve identified your primary keyword (e.g., Sell My House Fast in Dallas), you want to seamlessly incorporate it into your SEO title. However, avoid keyword stuffing—which is the practice of cramming too many keywords into one title. Search engines penalize titles that look unnatural, and they can turn off potential leads.

Example of keyword-stuffed title (what not to do):
Sell My House Fast Dallas | Cash Buyers in Dallas | Sell My Home Quickly in Dallas

Instead, focus on integrating primary and secondary keywords into a readable, actionable title. Secondary keywords could be variations like “cash buyers” or “no fees.”

Example of a well-crafted title:
Sell My House Fast in Dallas | Cash Buyers, No Fees, Close in 7 Days

Here, the primary keyword (Sell My House Fast in Dallas) is paired with additional value points—”cash buyers,” “no fees,” and “close in 7 days.” This not only incorporates a secondary keyword, but it also speaks directly to the concerns of motivated sellers.

Incorporate Emotional Triggers and Urgency

For real estate investors, the SEO title should inspire urgency and action. Motivated sellers often want a quick solution to their problem—whether that’s foreclosure, a looming divorce, or an inherited property they need to offload.

To drive clicks, add emotional triggers like:
- Speed: “Fast,” “Quick”
- Financial relief: “Cash Offer,” “No Fees”
- Simplicity: “Hassle-Free,” “No Repairs Needed”
Example:
We Buy Houses Fast in Dallas – Get a Cash Offer Today!

This title combines urgency (“Fast”) and simplicity (“Cash Offer Today”), pushing the lead to click through and learn more.

Balance Between Keyword Optimization and Readability

Remember, your SEO title should always prioritize readability. Titles that are too keyword-focused can look spammy and untrustworthy to users. Strike a balance between placing your keywords naturally and writing a title that reads well and addresses the user’s intent.

Step 3: Use Unique Selling Points (USPs)

Why Highlighting a Competitive Advantage Increases CTR

Unique Selling Points (USPs) set your business apart from the competition and give potential sellers a reason to choose you. In the real estate investing space, motivated sellers care about speed, convenience, and costs. Make sure your SEO title highlights your most compelling advantages.

Some common real estate-specific USPs include:
- No Fees: Many motivated sellers are dealing with financial difficulties, so the idea of avoiding costly agent fees is very appealing.
- Quick Closings: Sellers who are facing foreclosure or other urgent situations need reassurance that you can buy their home quickly.
- No Repairs Needed: Many sellers don’t want to spend time or money fixing up their home, so offering a hassle-free sale can make a big difference.
Real estate-specific examples of USPs:
- Sell Your Home Fast in Dallas – No Repairs, No Fees, Close in 7 Days
- We Buy Houses in Austin – Cash Offers in 24 Hours, Close Quickly
- Avoid Foreclosure in Minneapolis – Get a Cash Offer, No Commissions
Emphasize USPs Alongside Keywords

Including USPs in your SEO title can dramatically improve your CTR because they address the most pressing concerns of motivated sellers. In the example below, note how the USP (“No Fees, No Repairs”) is paired with the primary keyword (“Sell Your Home Fast”).

Example:
Sell Your Home Fast in Dallas – No Fees, No Repairs, Cash Offers in 24 Hours

This title not only optimizes for search engines by including the primary keyword but also drives clicks by showcasing the unique benefits you offer.

By following these steps to craft a high-converting SEO title, you’ll optimize your page for search engines and increase your chances of attracting motivated leads. Next, we’ll move on to creating equally powerful meta descriptions that reinforce your SEO title and further compel users to click.

Section 3: Writing a Compelling Meta Description

Your meta description is the second point of contact after the SEO title that convinces a user to click on your website link. It acts as a brief, yet powerful sales pitch, summarizing why the user should choose your site. Crafting an effective meta description involves understanding user intent, including a clear call-to-action (CTA), and addressing the pain points of motivated sellers. Here’s how you can write one that converts.

Step 1: Understand User Intent

The key to writing a high-performing meta description is understanding the user’s intent—what they want when they type their search query. In real estate, users generally fall into three categories: sellers, buyers, or investors. Knowing which audience you’re targeting will change how you craft the meta description.

Example:
A seller searching for “Sell my house fast in ” is motivated by speed and convenience, while an investor searching for “Best real estate investments in ” wants profit potential and market insights.

Your meta description should match that intent. For instance:
- Seller-focused: “Get a cash offer for your house today. We buy houses in with no repairs or fees!”
- Buyer-focused: “Find your dream home in . Browse homes for sale, schedule a viewing today!”
- Investor-focused: “Discover top real estate investment opportunities in . Maximize your ROI with expert guidance.”
Tactical Tip: Before writing the meta description, consider the user’s goal and the specific action they are looking to take. This will guide your messaging to better align with their intent, which increases the likelihood of a click.

Step 2: Include a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

Real estate is all about action, and adding a strong call-to-action (CTA) in your meta description is essential for increasing click-through rates. The CTA prompts the user to take the next step, whether it’s getting a cash offer, scheduling a consultation, or browsing available properties. Without a clear CTA, you risk losing the user’s attention even if your description grabs their interest.

Examples of strong real estate CTAs:
- “Request a Free Cash Offer”
- “Call Now for a Free Consultation”
- “Get a Cash Offer in 24 Hours”
CTAs work best when they’re placed near the end of your meta description. This way, users first see the benefit or solution you’re offering and are then prompted to take action.

Example of CTA placement within the character limit (150-160 characters):
“Need to sell fast? We buy houses in with no fees or repairs. Get your cash offer within 24 hours—Call Now!”

This meta description tells the user:
1. Their pain point (speed of sale) will be solved.
2. There are no additional fees or repair costs.
3. The next step is clearly outlined with the CTA “Call Now.”
Step 3: Address Pain Points and Solutions

One of the most effective ways to increase clicks is by addressing the user’s pain points directly in your meta description. Sellers looking for quick solutions to issues like foreclosure, unwanted repairs, or relocation are motivated by how quickly you can solve their problems. When your meta description speaks to these concerns and offers a solution, users are more likely to click through to your site.

Common real estate seller pain points:
- Foreclosure: Financial distress may force sellers to seek quick solutions to avoid foreclosure.
- Repairs: Sellers may not have the time, money, or energy to fix up a house before selling.
- Relocation: Moving quickly due to a job or personal situation often requires a fast home sale.
Example of addressing a pain point: “Need to sell fast? Avoid foreclosure and get a cash offer within 24 hours. No repairs needed—sell your house as-is!”

This meta description tackles multiple concerns:
1. The user is reassured they can avoid foreclosure.
2. They don’t need to worry about repairs.
3. They are offered a quick solution—cash in 24 hours.
By solving the problem in the meta description, you’re positioning yourself as the go-to solution for sellers in distress.

By following these three steps—understanding user intent, including a clear CTA, and addressing pain points—you’ll write meta descriptions that not only capture attention but also drive conversions. The ultimate goal is to get motivated sellers, buyers, or investors to click through to your site, bringing them one step closer to becoming a lead.

Section 4: A/B Testing and Analyzing Results

Once you’ve written your SEO titles and meta descriptions, it’s crucial to track their performance and make adjustments for improvement. A/B testing and performance analysis will help you discover what resonates with your target audience and leads to more clicks and conversions. In this section, we’ll walk you through monitoring your click-through rate (CTR), running A/B tests, and optimizing your meta tags based on real data.

Step 1: Monitor CTR in Google Search Console

The first step in optimizing your SEO titles and meta descriptions is to monitor your click-through rate (CTR). CTR shows how often people click your link after seeing it on a search engine results page (SERP). Monitoring this data gives you insights into how effective your titles and descriptions are at attracting clicks.

How to Track CTR:
1. Log into your Carrot Dashboard. Carrot members can integrate Google Search Console directly with their dashboard, making it easy to track performance.
2. Access the “Search Performance” Report. In Google Search Console, navigate to the “Search Performance” section. Here, you’ll find valuable data on how your website is performing, including impressions, clicks, and CTR for specific pages. You can monitor this directly from your Carrot dashboard.
  - Here’s a link to Carrot’s detailed training on using Google Search Console: Search Performance in Google Search Console.
3. CTR Benchmarks for Real Estate Websites: The CTR for real estate websites can vary, but a healthy target CTR is between 2-5%. If your CTR is lower, it may be time to revisit your SEO titles and meta descriptions to make them more engaging.
Step 2: A/B Testing Different Titles and Descriptions

A/B testing, also known as split testing, allows you to compare two variations of your SEO titles or meta descriptions to see which performs better. For real estate websites, this is a powerful strategy to fine-tune your messaging and increase your CTR and conversions.

How to Run A/B Tests:
1. Choose the Elements to Test.
  Start by selecting one variable at a time—either the SEO title or the meta description. This helps you clearly see which element is driving any changes in performance. For example, you might test adding urgency to your title:
  - Version A: “We Buy Houses Fast in – No Repairs Needed”
  - Version B: “Sell Your House for Cash in – Quick Closing!”
2. Use Tools for A/B Testing.
  Tools like Google Optimize or plugins like Yoast SEO Premium allow you to easily set up A/B tests for meta descriptions and SEO titles. These tools track how each version performs over time, so you can confidently pick the best option.
3. Set a Testing Timeline.
  Run each test for a sufficient amount of time, usually a minimum of 2 weeks or until you have a statistically significant amount of data. The longer the test runs, the more reliable your results will be.
Step 3: Optimize for Performance

After collecting data from your A/B tests, it’s time to analyze and optimize your SEO titles and meta descriptions to boost performance. Small tweaks can make a big difference, especially when you incorporate elements that address user pain points or highlight unique selling propositions.

Key Optimization Tips:
1. Review CTR Data.
  If one variation outperforms the other, consider what made it more effective. For example, did adding urgency or highlighting “cash offers” result in more clicks? Continue to revise based on what you learn.
2. Tweak Based on User Behavior.
  If you notice that certain keywords or phrases perform well, apply them to similar pages. For example, if you test “Sell Your Home As-Is” and it increases CTR, roll out this phrase to other listings targeting motivated sellers.
Take Action:
Implement these A/B testing strategies to refine your SEO titles and meta descriptions. Track your CTR regularly through Google Search Console and always be ready to optimize based on performance. With the right testing and analysis, you can turn small changes into big results!

Section 5: Common Pitfalls to Avoid

While crafting SEO titles and meta descriptions can significantly improve your website’s performance, there are several common mistakes you need to avoid. Missteps like keyword stuffing, vague messaging, and neglecting local SEO can undermine your efforts, leading to poor CTR and fewer conversions. Here’s how to steer clear of these pitfalls.

Keyword Stuffing in Titles and Descriptions

Many real estate investors mistakenly believe that cramming as many keywords as possible into their SEO titles and meta descriptions will improve their rankings. However, keyword stuffing can hurt both your rankings and user experience.

Why Overusing Keywords is Harmful:
1. Hinders Readability.
  Keyword-stuffed titles and descriptions sound unnatural and may confuse or frustrate users. Remember, your meta description is often the first impression a potential lead has of your business. If it feels robotic or clunky, they are less likely to click.
2. Hurts SEO.
  Search engines like Google have become much better at recognizing and penalizing keyword stuffing. Your title or description could be flagged as spammy, which could cause your rankings to drop.
Example of Keyword Stuffing (Avoid This):

“Cash Home Buyers | Sell My House Fast in | No Realtor Fees | Cash Home Buyers in | We Buy Houses Fast in ”
This example overloads the title with repetitive keywords, sacrificing clarity and professionalism.

How to Fix It:

Focus on one or two primary keywords and ensure the title flows naturally: “Sell Your House Fast for Cash in – No Repairs, No Fees!”
This is clear, concise, and targets relevant keywords without sacrificing readability.

Vague or Misleading Titles/Descriptions

Another common mistake is crafting titles or descriptions that are either too vague or misleading. Setting clear, realistic expectations is crucial for building trust with motivated sellers and buyers.

Why Vague or Misleading Copy Hurts Conversions:
1. Decreases Trust.
  If a potential lead clicks on your link expecting one thing but finds something different on the page, they will likely bounce (leave the page immediately). This not only results in a lost lead but can negatively impact your SEO through higher bounce rates.
2. Undermines Your Authority.
  Real estate is a trust-driven business. Your SEO titles and meta descriptions need to reflect your services honestly and accurately, otherwise, you risk losing credibility with your audience.
Example of a Misleading Title (Avoid This):

“Sell Your House for Cash Fast – Guaranteed Offer in 24 Hours!”
While this may sound appealing, guaranteeing an offer within 24 hours is not always feasible or honest for most real estate investors.

How to Fix It:

Be truthful about what you can offer: “Sell Your Home Fast for Cash – Get an Offer in 24-48 Hours!”
This sets a more realistic expectation, building trust without overselling.

Ignoring Local SEO Best Practices

In real estate, local SEO is paramount. Ignoring the use of location-specific keywords in your titles and descriptions can cause you to miss out on highly targeted traffic. Motivated sellers and buyers are searching for local solutions, and your meta tags need to reflect that.

Why Location-Based Keywords Matter:
1. More Targeted Leads.
  Sellers are typically looking to offload properties in a specific location. By including location-based keywords, you ensure that your website appears for relevant searches like “sell my house fast in ” or “cash home buyers in .”
2. Higher CTR and Conversion Rates.
  Users are much more likely to click on listings that match their location. By adding local keywords, you increase the relevance of your site to the searcher, which improves both CTR and conversion rates.
Example of Ignoring Local SEO (Avoid This):

“We Buy Houses Fast – Get a Cash Offer Today”
While this headline might generate some interest, it lacks a local focus, making it harder for people in your target market to find you.

How to Fix It:

Always include your city or region in the title: “We Buy Houses in – Fast Cash Offers with No Repairs!”
This version includes the city name, immediately signaling to the searcher that you operate in their area.

Take Action:
To improve your click-through rates and attract more motivated leads, avoid these common mistakes. Use keywords naturally, set clear expectations, and always focus on local SEO. By fine-tuning these details, you’ll see more qualified traffic and ultimately more conversions!

Conclusion

Optimizing your SEO titles and meta descriptions is one of the most effective ways to increase your click-through rates and generate motivated leads. By following the tactical steps outlined in this guide, you can craft compelling titles and descriptions that attract more clicks and convert more users into leads.

For further guidance on real estate SEO, consider signing up for Carrot’s SEO tools or schedule a demo with our team to see how we can help you optimize your website for success.
July 27, 2017

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