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Announcing Carrot Real Estate Agent Websites: Helping Agents Stand Out From The Clutter Online

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Over the past 4 years, we’ve grown Carrot from a fledgling “real estate investor website” software into the most effective tool for generating leads online for real estate investors. Bringing in more online leads than any other platform, climbing well into the millions of leads across thousands of active Carrot clients all across the U.S., Canada, the UK, and even some successful clients as far off as South Africa. While our main clients are house flippers/wholesalers, land investors, and other investors looking for motivated sellers, cash buyers, and tenant leads… we’ve found the clients who consistently get an edge in this competitive market are the ones who are also real estate agents. Why? Well for a few reasons. Listing on the market is a viable solution for more sellers in up markets. Agent/Investors can turn more leads into income vs. discarding great leads that don’t perfectly fit just that one box. Giving house sellers multiple options (list with us or sell to us) helps improve the close ratio and build trust with sellers. Agents have access to data and tools that non-agents don’t. In competitive markets that are cluttered with competition, you’ve got to do everything you can to avoid being caught up in the clutter of options. Does Your Real Estate Agent Website Leave You Lost In The Clutter? When you look at most real estate agents websites most of them tend to do the same things. They have… A pretty picture of you somewhere on the site Local MLS listings Fancy calculators and tools … and a bunch of generic content for buyers and sellers not unique to your expertise as an agent When buyers and sellers are looking at their options, if every agent they look at all has only the usual things on their websites (those things above) it’s the agents that build trust, authority, and credibility with content that win out in a competitive market. Are you standing out with your website and content online or just becoming part of the clutter? One lost listing per year from an underperforming website can cost you what? $3,000? $5,000? $20,000? How AgentCarrot Can Help You Stand Out From The Clutter Introducing Carrot real estate agent websites. For years the way Carrot clients began to dominate their markets online started with a highly optimized website (for SEO and lead conversion) then amplified with our content marketing tools and training. We’ve been in the beta phase with Carrot for the past year and now we’re rolling it out of beta with a crazy exciting vision on how we’ll continue to improve how real estate agents and investors grow your business leveraging the web. Now we’re bringing that same technology and strategy to real estate agents to dominate the online conversation in your own market. To leverage your own unique expertise to stand out from the clutter so you’re the best viable option for your ideal client in your market. How does AgentCarrot help you do that? Let’s dive in and check out some of the ways AgentCarrot will help you save time and stand out from other agents in your market who are all doing the “same ol’ things”. Beautiful High Converting Website Designs + Optional IDX Nearly 60% of the 10s of thousands of leads our clients pull in each month are on mobile devices. So we’ve taken a mobile-first design approach… ensuring that your website not only looks beautiful and converts well on the desktop… but especially on mobile devices. Beautiful Featured Property Listings With AgentCarrot you can create Featured Property Listings to really showcase your best listings with any content you want to add. You’re … Continued

How to Use HARO to Get Backlinks

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If you’ve ever run a successful SEO campaign before, you’ll know that building high-quality backlinks to your site is critical. If you want to win organic search traffic via SEO, you need to be sure that all 3 pillars of your campaign—technical SEO, content marketing, and backlinks—are executed on correctly. It’s easy to use an off the shelf platform like Carrot to ensure your site is technically sound, and it’s relatively simple to write and publish high value content to your site. The biggest challenge most people have involves link building. While many methods are highly complex, and others feel uncomfortable or unethical, one stands out as a clear winner. You can earn backlinks from some of the highest authority websites without having to write long articles, building an extensive network of industry influencers, or speaking on endless numbers of podcasts. In my experience, this single strategy wins out against the rest, bringing the highest ROI of all link building methods, landing links in key media outlets and major publications such as Forbes, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance. In this article, I’ll explain the HARO link building process, and how you can use HARO for your real estate SEO campaign. Introduction to Help a Reporter Out Help A Reporter Out, or HARO for short, is a simple platform that connects journalists and content producers that with expert sources, to give their content more credibility, and deeper insights. Every day, hundreds of HARO queries are sent out from journalists, asking experts to provide input into their content. Most of this input is in the form of a quote, but it can also involve TV or radio interviews as well. Help a Reporter Out (HARO) was founded by Peter Shankman as a service for journalists to connect with people who could be relevant sources for their reporting. HARO was later acquired and is currently part of Connectively. In 2024, Peter Shankman launched Source of Sources, based on the original HARO model. Qwoted is another popular tool for connecting journalists with subject matter experts. You can follow the guidance below to connect with journalists via the platform of your choice. Why You Should Use HARO for Link Building Building links with HARO outreach involves finding journalists looking for relevant sources for their articles. Unlike other forms of outreach (like guest posting), these journalists need a source, and they want to hear from you. In exchange for your valuable quote, they will credit you, typically with a dofollow or nofollow backlink to your site. Yes, that’s right. SEOs like yourself can use HARO pitches to secure backlinks from websites with tons of link equity, for free! Your quotes are often syndicated in other publications across the internet, shared on social media, and included in other related press mentions, all of which can boost the power of your links further. It also helps with improved brand visibility as both your personal and business name become cited sources. This adds trust when potential clients or sellers look to find an agent, agency or investor to work with. The end result is, you get hard-to-get links from credible news sources, bringing traffic from the journalist’s article, a high-quality backlink to your website, better search engine rankings to your content, and most importantly, more leads for your business. Other Benefits of Using Help a Reporter Out As I mentioned above, backlinks are just one of the many benefits. Many people think of this practise as “HARO SEO”, but the benefits really don’t end there. While I’ve had my fair share of success through SEO, I’ll … Continued

Did You See Your Rankings Dip After Integrating HTTPS/SSL On Your Website? Here’s Why

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It’s been about two months since we launched free SSL integration for Carrot customers. As of this article’s creation, 2,327 Carrot websites have made the switch from HTTP to HTTPS. And here’s what some of them are saying. “Setting up SSL was so easy. I have been waiting for this and I am glad you all implemented this in such a simple way!” — Lamar Cannon from Lamar Buys Houses “Although a boring update for most, I’m glad to see this added. Also, bravo on the execution. Easy to use, and rolling it into existing offering was way to go versus having us mess with renewals and certificates. Appreciate the hard work and continued improvement!” — Tyler Weinrich from Tyler Buys Houses “Thank you! Implementing SSL properly can be difficult and I’m impressed by how easy you guys have made it on us users. Everything worked perfectly per the instructions.” — Jeffrey Miller from AE Home Group We’ve seen lots of websites increase in ranking already (it could be a coincidence in the timing or a small part could be SSL… too soon to tell) and those clients are already seeing the other benefits of SSL. But we’ve heard from some members that after making their site SSL they experienced a drop in Google rankings… so we’ve created this post to address that concern and to walk you through things you can do if you experienced a drop… and to dive into the reasons a site could drop after adding SSL. If you did, don’t worry — that dip is actually quite common and almost always temporary. Here’s what you need to know. “Why did my Rankings Decrease after Integrating SSL?” Unfortunately, it’s hard to know the exact reason(s) that your ranking fell. It’s possible, for instance, that you noticed a dip in your rankings after integrating SSL and yet, the dip had nothing to do with the transition. From on-page SEO to SERP competition to backlinks, the world of SEO is complicated and discovering the reason for a sliding website isn’t a simple matter. Still, it is possible that SSL made your website slide a bit. So now let’s deal with the follow-up question: “Why the heck would you recommend that I integrate SSL if it’s going to hurt my rankings?” The answer to that question is this: because while SSL might dip your rankings in the short run, it will secure or even increase your rankings in the long run. Here’s what Google has to say about this: “Expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move. With any significant change to a site, you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site. As a general rule, a medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move in our index; larger sites can take longer. The speed at which Googlebot and our systems discover and process moved URLs largely depends on the number of URLs and your server speed. Submitting a sitemap can help make the discovery process quicker, and it’s fine to move your site in sections.” In simpler terms, this means that if your decrease in rankings was caused by SSL integration (which it might not have been), then it will most likely be temporary until Google has a chance to index all of your new pages. Think about it this way. When your website moves from HTTP to HTTPS, in Google’s eyes, all of those HTTPS pages of your website aren’t the same pages at the HTTP version, but duplicates. With SSL integration, then, all of those HTTP pages redirect to HTTPS pages. And Google takes time to register and index all … Continued

EP 94: How to Establish Power Habits in Your Life w/ Geoff Woods, Vice President of The ONE Thing

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Listen to the CarrotCast Podcast and Subscribe Below! The most successful people I was able to meet, showed up looking to give rather than looking to get. They weren’t asking people what they can do to help them. They would sit down with being way more successful than you and look at you in the eyes and ask what’s going on in your world and how can they help you. Geoff Woods I don’t know about you, but I really believe things happen for a reason. I’ve had so many instances in my life where something happened after I set an insanely clear intention. For like, nothing happened and then weirdly enough it did. And I explained one of those situations when I introduced today’s guest, Geoff Woods, from The ONE Thing Company, and this book was one of those things that made a massive impact on my life. I read The ONE Thing from Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, probably five, six years ago. Literally, since then, I have had my focusing question written down and taped to my computer. So, I wanted to get Geoff Woods on to this call because I’ve been following their podcasts on The ONE Thing. I mean, following what they’ve been saying and I’m subscribed to it on iTunes. Where I am in my life right now, is I’m struggling day to day to really be focusing on what is the most important thing that I should be doing right now. Because, as you’re an entrepreneur and just living life, too, you don’t have to be an entrepreneur, the biggest struggle we can all have is the one resource we have that we never get back is time. What are you focusing on in the time that you have to make the biggest impact that you wanna make towards the things you feel are the most important? Because a lot of us are doing lots of different things that aren’t very important. A lot of us are spending lots of time doing things that are urgent but not very important. So, on this episode of this CarrotCast, I asked Geoff Woods from The ONE Thing Podcast and The ONE Thing Company to come on here. We have some awesome breakthroughs on this call. Geoff goes into a section towards the end of this call where he starts asking me some questions that gets pretty personal. Honestly, if you’re watching the video version of this, my eyes started tearing up a little bit, and it hit me pretty good because I know those are things that I need to work on better. From this call, I’m going to be going home, doing something Geoff asked me to do on this call and taking the picture and sending it to him to show that I followed through on what we had talked about. You’re going to be picking up lots of amazing nuggets on this podcast, some great resources, how to create power habits in your life, how to go out there and focus on the things that are important. Also, you’re gonna be hearing some amazingly powerful stories with Geoff and myself on how you can just live and be a better person, a better entrepreneur. How you can actually spend the time that you have right now today on the things that actually matter. Because odds are, you’re not. So, without further ado, I’m gonna welcome on Geoff Woods from The ONE Thing Podcast, and when I talk about serendipity when I talk about things happening for a reason, we explain a short story in there, … Continued

Real Estate Website Hosting: 4 Things To Consider Before Buying

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Imagine this… It’s Black Friday and you’re the CEO of one of the biggest shopping centers in the world. In the middle of the day, at noon, your in-store payment processing system crashes. For six hours, shoppers have to pay with cash or leave without buying. Not only does it hurt your company’s revenue stream, it hurts your company’s reputation. Sound like a nightmare? Well, this is exactly what happened to Macy’s on November 24th, 2017. And similar horrors happen online — from security breaches to untimely website crashes to load-speed issues. In the digital age that we’re all living in, those scenarios can have the same impact as a downed Macy’s on Black Friday. After all, how would you feel if your information got stolen while on a real estate agent or investor’s website? Or if you had to wait a full minute just for their website to load? Or if their website crashed while you were looking at house listings? You get the point. These are problems… big problems. Fortunately, you can avoid most of these revenue-killing scenarios by choosing the right real estate website host. In fact, here are four things that you should consider when selecting hosting for your real estate website. Real Estate Website Hosting Consideration #1: Security One source reports that 86% of websites have at least one “serious” vulnerability. And perhaps there’s no more important real estate website hosting consideration than security. If your website is open to peering eyes, then your information or your visitor’s information can get stolen. No good. If someone steals your visitor’s information while they’re on your website, then you can count on them never visiting your website again. And you can definitely count on them never working with you. Sadly, this is such a problem that 71% of adults say that they are not confident that their information will stay private when working with a company. (Image Source) For that reason, 86% of internet users have tried actively to minimize the visibility of their digital footprint while 55% have tried to hide from specific people or organizations when online. Clearly, people care a lot about their privacy. If that privacy is violated, then, generally speaking, it’s an unforgivable sin of online business. That’s why so many businesses rely on tools for IT professionals. And if someone steals your information… well, it’s quite difficult to manage a website when a cybercriminal is running around with your login credentials. But real estate website hosting security isn’t just important because you want everyone’s information to stay safe. That is the most important reason, but not the only benefit. Take SSL integration, for instance. Websites that have HTTPS instead of HTTP actually tend to rank better in search engines, which means more passive traffic and better real estate lead generation. (Image Source) And since 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, that SSL integration can help unlock a wealth of revenue-generating potential. Sure, it won’t automatically place you at the top of the rankings, but having SSL on your website is par for the course — if you don’t have it, then you’re likely to fall below the competition in search engines. For the sake of your privacy, your visitor’s privacy, and even your Google rankings, you should consider real estate website hosting that has the following features. At Carrot, we offer all of these protections so that you never have to think twice about whether or not your website is secure. We even have several dev team members behind the scenes who constantly help monitor your website to respond to any problems within seconds. We’d love to work with you — whether investor or agent :-) Whatever … Continued

Custom Real Estate Website Design: 3 Things You’ve Got to Have

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Right now, more than ever, you must have custom real estate website design. In fact, 99% of millennials (21 – 37 years old) search online when looking for a home. I know, I know. Whoop-dee-do, no surprise. But here’s a few stats that are surprising. 89% of older baby boomers (54 – 72 years old) also use the internet during a house search and 77% of the silent generation (76 – 93 years old) do the same. In fact, 44% of homebuyers across all ages purchase a home that they find on the internet. This means that despite the age of your prospect, people are looking online at some point during their house hunt — more than likely. And since they’re looking online, you need to be online. If you’re not, you’re losing business. End of story… “Here, you can have my clients, savvy internet real estate competition,” type of bye, bye. And as you already know, those clients that work with the competition will do so again in the future — you don’t just lose them right now, you lose them forever. Of course, that’s not always the case, but it often is. Unfortunately, just being online isn’t enough, either. You need a website that drives traffic and converts visitors. In most cases, having your face on a corporate real estate website isn’t adequate, and neither is a cruddy website that your tech-buddy designed. I don’t have anything against your tech buddy or your real estate corporation, but I do want to help. For that reason, here at Carrot, we asked ourselves, “What are the three most important elements for any custom real estate website design to have?” This is what we came up with. Custom Real Estate Website Design Must #1: Easy Navigation When someone lands on your website, they want to do something. But what, exactly, do they want to do? Fortunately, in the real estate niche, that’s a relatively easy question to answer. People either want to learn about who you are (i.e. Can they trust you? Do you have a reliable track record? Do you seem legit?) or what you do (i.e. They want to pursue your services). Put more simply, visitors want to… 1. Learn whether they can trust you. Or… 2. Work with you. Pretty simple, huh? Yeah. At least on the surface. But here’s the thing: even guiding those two simple intentions requires some savvy website navigation. After all, the last thing you want is for visitors to land on a website that looks like this. If you arrived on this website, you’d leave within the first few seconds — your visitors will do the same thing. In fact, 38% of people will leave a website with an unattractive layout. What, really, though, is the problem with the above website? Because if we look beyond the hideous colors and hard-to-read text, there’s something even worse: poor navigation. Since people don’t know where to go, they leave. And you don’t have to take my word for it. One study found that 50% of referral-based website traffic immediately uses a website’s navigation menu to orient themselves. This is why, at Carrot, we include dead-simple navigation menus on our customer’s websites. For Investors… And agents… The moment that prospects land on those websites is the same moment that prospects know exactly what to do and where to go. Immediately, then, those websites build trust. A website without simple navigation, on the other hand, hurts trust and increases your bounce rate — which, in turn, hurts your business and the financial independence that you so ambitiously crave. The point is, a cluttered and hard-to-navigate website hurts everyone and helps no one. What, though, … Continued

Real Estate Website SEO: 5 Things To Consider When Trying To Rank Your Website

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You may know that Google uses about 200 factors when ranking a website. Some factors have been confirmed, others are speculative. We’re not going to dive into all 200, but we are going to focus on the most important real estate website SEO factors. I’m going to break down the real estate SEO strategy into five main groups: Content Backlink Profile On-Page SEO Technical Factors Website Traffic & User Behavior But first… What Does SEO Mean In Real Estate? Maybe you don’t know this, but SEO is not a real-estate specific term. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it refers to the act of trying to optimize your website to show up in search engines (like Google, Bing, and Yahoo) according to the algorithmic, semantic preferences of the targeted search engine. SEO is usually achieved by including specific keywords on a web page that quickly tell search engines what the page is about, generating high-quality links to a specific page, using relevant anchor text, and producing consistent long-form pieces of content. In the end, search engines want to deliver high-quality, relevant, and trust-worthy results to searchers. Now, I’m going to break down five things you need to consider for your own real estate website’s SEO — so that you can fall among the few who actually show up to searchers. 1. Content We have all heard the phrase “content is king,” and as much as I dislike that phrase, it’s true. Content is still extremely relevant in 2018 and there seems to be a direct correlation between unique and relevant content and ranking well in Google. That’s why Zach with Nexus Homebuyers consistently posts relevant content on his blog. Not only does your content need to be both unique and relevant, it needs to be lengthy. An article’s length, or word count, provides the user with in-depth information and therefore appears more trustworthy. And the larger the search volume for your target keywords, the longer your content needs to be. The exact ideal length of an article is debatable, but the research indicates a word count of at least 600 words for low search volume keywords (1-100) and 725 words for high volume keywords (10,000 plus) is workable. If you want to find out which real estate SEO keywords to target and how much competition each keyword phrase has (without doing any of the work), you can download Carrot’s free SEO Keyword Bible for Agents or their SEO Keyword Bible for Investors.  Additionally, Google is focusing more on keywords within your content as opposed to the title tag, H1 tag, and meta description. According to a searchmetric’s study, keyword inclusion in the title tag, H1 tag, and meta description is decreasing year over year, which indicates Google is giving more weight to how relevant your content is. There is a very strong correlation between the pages in position 1-6 and content relevance. Two key takeaways: Optimize your content length for the competitiveness of your target keyword phrase. Create relevant and genuinely helpful content (not just content created for search engines). 4 Real Estate Content Marketing Strategies You Can Actually Use to Grow Your Business 2. Backlink Profile For many years, backlinks were the foundation for a website’s rankings. A strong backlink profile used to be the main focus for real estate website SEO, but lately there has been a decline in backlink relevance. Today, backlinks are important but they are also just one of the many contributing signals when ranking a website. Looking forward, I expect to see a continued decline in backlink relevance in the coming years. Just because backlinks are declining in relevance, though, … Continued

5 Real Estate Market Predictions (And What They Mean For The Agent And Investor)

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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. 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 … Continued

Announcing Free SSL for Carrot Sites

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Carrot now automatically includes SSL with every site! Supporting SSL https:// for our Carrot member’s sites has been on our radar for a while… it’s definitely one of those items on the todo list when building your own website. Typically this means heading back to your domain registrar, paying for a certificate, doing some complicated verification steps on your hosting account, some more complicated server stuff, fixing things when they go wrong… then heading back to your registrar each year to pay them some more money and do the process over again for a renewal. All in all… usually a 1 hour + time commitment and $50+ a year for a solid SSL cert. At Carrot, Your SSL Cert Is Now FREE! What is SSL? It stands for “Secure Socket Layer”, and that’s a fancy way to say a website is accessed with https:// instead of http:// and the connection is encrypted between your browser and company serving the website. Read on for more info! For the thousands of Carrot member sites (and the thousands more we knew would be launched this next year) sending all of our members out there to purchase an SSL certificate to maintain and renew ($$) each year was not the “Carrot way” to do it. Why We’re Rolling SSL Out Now Payments, sensitive personal info, and passwords have always been important things that should be encrypted with SSL, but recently there have been another set of benefits for SSL as well. The first and most important reason is… Security SSL exists to make the connection between you and a website private. Without this, the data you send over the network could potentially be spied on by someone else on your network. This is something web visitors, your web browser, and even Google are looking for more and more and we wanted to get you ahead of the curve. SEO Google is now using SSL as a minor potential ranking factor. There have been reports over the last 6 months of their “fear” that having SSL was required to rank well today and convert a visitor into a lead at a high rate. Our focus has always been on data and performance so we’ve been tracking the trends and just haven’t seen Google rewarding SSL sites over a well optimized Carrot site in the search rankings… YET. In fact, we’ve seen an uptick in Carrot member websites rankings (often times over an SSL encrypted site). So over the past 4 months we’ve focused our efforts on rolling out other big updates to our platform that speed up your websites even more which Google has been weighting more heavily than SSL for quite some time. At the end of the day, we follow the data vs. the hype and ensure we’re putting you ahead of the curve when it comes to SEO and performance. SSL will increasingly become a factor Google looks at and we want to continue to see Carrot members at the top of the search results for their terms that matter, we want to give you every edge possible with rankings! How Adding SSL Can Impact Current SEO Rankings We make changing your URL from a non-SSL url to an SSL url extremely simple and quick; however, don’t discount the complexity of things going on behind the scenes with this change. There’s a lot that goes on and this is a decently big change in Googles eyes, because you’re changing the URL structure of your website that Google looks at for it’s rankings. There are many things one would need to do to ensure an SSL is added correctly (we automate … Continued