Building a Powerhouse Online Presence: Harnessing Modern SEO & AI to Drive Leads

All of our leads, no matter where they come from, most of the time they always hit our website. … So, it’s pretty cool to have Carrot. I appreciate it.

Johnathan Ortiz has been a real estate investor specializing in wholesaling, flips, and notations in southern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware for seven years. Despite having a background in tech and AI, he didn’t think about his website as a lead generation tool at first. Because he didn’t think it was that important, he went with a Squarespace site. 

“I just used one of their templates. It was really crappy,” he said. “I really only did it just so I have a website. I wasn’t even thinking about leads or optimizing, having people come in.”

His Squarespace site cost $250 a year, but didn’t generate a single lead, according to Johnathan. On top of that, it was difficult to adjust for SEO and to build effective location pages — critical components for online lead generation. 

He knew he needed to make a change in order to grow his local presence, have a website that effectively converted visitors into leads, and generate organic search leads instead of relying solely on paid ads.

So he moved to Carrot.

Moving to Carrot & Testing the SEO Waters

“I found Carrot because people always recommend it,” Johnathan explained. “When you go to these Facebook groups or whatever, they always recommend Carrot for your lead generation website. It’s built and optimized for leads to come in and fill out a form.”

Johnathan launched his Carrot site in late 2025. One year later, his site has attracted more than 1,800 visitors and netted him over 150 leads — far outperforming his Squarespace website (and costing him less too!).

Having a strong lead generation site makes him feel more comfortable that his company can attract leads with a smaller marketing budget if needed.

“We’re doing everything you can think of, pay per lead, Google, Facebook, all that kind of stuff. So when a market slows down, your leads slow down with it, or leads get a little tougher. You’re always trying to think of other avenues to get leads,” he said. “Now that I have a slow time, I’m starting to think about what I want next year to look like when we’re around this time of year. If my marketing spend has to go down because everything’s just a lot tougher, how else can I get leads?”

He knows that SEO is the answer, but understands that it’s a long game that takes skill. All Carrot websites have foundational SEO best practices in place, but being in a competitive market, Johnathan wanted to boost his SEO even more. He started by hiring SEO contractors from Upwork, but felt the results could be better.

“They didn’t really do much. They kind of just did a blog post here, blog post there. They did those cheap backlink packages that don’t even help you. After a while, I’m like, ‘Man, I’m not really seeing anything.’ I know it’s supposed to take a while, but I feel like there’s not even much being done.”

He was also concerned about the quality of their work and its potentially negative impact on his SEO and AI search visibility.

“They just copy/pasted every location page, so none of my pages were unique. Google doesn’t like that. ChatGPT doesn’t like that.”

Johnathan knew that sites that dive deep on proper SEO work. And he was positive that his site would convert … he just needed to get more people there.

“I always hear about people getting so many organic leads from their website off Google searches, not ads. I’m like, man, I need to really optimize and take advantage of that because I have a converting website. I know it converts because when we run ads, we have really good conversion rates. So, the website should be able to get me more leads. I just got to figure out how to get those going.”

His solution?

Use AI to help him hyper-optimize his website and overall SEO and AI search presence.

Taking SEO to the Next Level

Johnathan is used to building AI agents from his former role in cybersecurity, so he decided to take the same approach to optimizing his online presence.

“I built AI agents, and I was like, ‘All right, this is what I’m going to do. We’re going to optimize everything. We’re going to do deep research.’ Now we’re in a whole different ballgame.”

Johnathan built an SEO AI agent and a listings AI agent to make sure his website stays optimized, identify new SEO opportunities for him to capitalize on, and ensure his business is included in online listing databases.

He uses the SEO agent to find technical SEO issues like missing H1 tags (similar to Carrot’s built-in AI Site Audit tool). But it can also identify new keywords for him to target or grow and create original content.

New Target Keywords

“[My SEO agent] will use Google Search Console to see what our website actually pops up for and what we’re not converting,” he explained. “For example, Voorhees is a section in New Jersey where we market. It found we were getting a lot of impressions on Google, like 2,000 impressions, but people weren’t converting on our page. So it took the long keyword that people were typing and built a page on my Carrot site with that keyword in the URL slug, the H1 heading in the body, and in the image alt text. Now, when people type in that long keyword that is getting a lot of impressions, we’ll be like the first ones to pop up.”

Note: You can also connect your Google Search Console to your Carrot account to get similar insights inside the Carrot Dashboard.

Topical Blog Posts

“My SEO agent will also go create blog posts that are very locality-specific. For example, it’ll do like the Philadelphia Sheriff Sale and how to get out of the sheriff sale, or what are you dealing with when you’re in the sheriff sale, and it’ll build a whole blog post about that. So when people are typing in, ‘Hey I’m losing my house to a sheriff sale in Philadelphia,’ my blog will pop up and a lead could come.”

Unique Location Pages

“It created [pages for] all the cities we’re in, but then it went deeper. New Jersey is weird, sometimes people don’t search their actual city. Instead of searching ‘sell my house Cherry Hill,’ they’ll say ‘sell my house Camden County New Jersey.’ So it went and built out all those pages for us to make sure we’re hitting all those different points.”

He also makes sure the location pages are highly relevant to each location to prove that he knows the areas. This makes him stand out from other investors that produce generic pages.

“You go on my ‘sell house fast Philadelphia’ page, for example, and it’ll talk about L&I, which is Philly’s local licensing and inspections unit. It’ll talk about the Philadelphia Sheriff Sale. It’ll talk about the different sections of the city,” he explained. “It makes it better for the leads because if a lead says they’re in Bensalem, PA and they see the page is very tailored to them and it’s talking about things that they know about in those areas, they’re more likely to trust you versus they go to a regular website and it just says ‘we buy houses Bensalem’ and doesn’t talk anything else about Bensalem throughout the page.”

(Carrot recently released an AI Location Pages feature that creates unique copy for each location you target!)

He’s taking his SEO and AI optimization beyond his website too, a key part of good AI search visibility. In addition to the SEO agent, Johnathan also built a listing agent to find online business directories he should be included in.

“It basically surfs the web and finds every single place where we should get a business profile. So like, Bing, Yelp, Apple, like all these random places. It finds hundreds of them and then it correlates with my Grok AI agent and builds the profiles out for me. So we have our company profile in all these different places. So now if you look us up on Google, we’ll probably take like two pages just because we have the listings.”

All this hard work and dedication to online visibility has paid off already. Johnathan has seen an increase in organic leads and AI-assisted leads. 

“We’re starting to see leads come in that otherwise we wouldn’t have before. We’re getting ChatGPT leads from our optimized website now,” he said. “Like  days after I started implementing all this stuff, we started getting leads from ChatGPT, different listing websites, leads coming in from all those different sources.”

A Carrot Website at the Heart of His Business

Johnathan’s AI agents wouldn’t have much to build on or optimize if his Carrot site hadn’t provided a strong foundation to start on. While the bots attract new leads, he’s confident that Carrot provides the conversion optimization framework needed to convert them.

“All of our leads, no matter where they come from, most of the time they always hit our website. So, having a website is very, very important. Having it optimized for those different things is important. So, it’s pretty cool to have Carrot. I appreciate it.”

He didn’t have that confidence with his original Squarespace website. And he doesn’t think he’d get it anywhere else, either.

“I always tell my guys, if you’re looking for a website, you have to use Carrot. There’s no one you could use.”