Agent Carrot Website Reviews?

[Michael Ward]

Hi fellow agents and brokers. Do any of you use Carrot for your Real Estate Agent website? I'd love to get your feedback. Thanks!

[Trevor Mauch]

I just stumbled on this thread, great convo in here! 

@Jake Baker hope you're well! Lead Propeller is a solid system. We focus on different things than them, we focus tightly on performance and the SEO / conversion side of things while they focus a bit on some other things. Aaron A. (the owner) is a really good friend of mine and I'm excited to see them start to make improvements to the system. 

@Gearold White I'd love to connect man as I'm pretty confused by your post. On the customer service, we really take pride in the experience we deliver (98% of clients rate our live chat support "excellent", which still leaves us 2% to keep challenging ourselfs to improve! :-).  But I do take any complaints I hear 100% seriously as we all make mistakes and I want to see where we can improve and where our team may have missed something. We work with thousands of clients and I'm crazy proud of the experience our team has created, but always room to improve. 

As far as Carrot and SEO, I'd love to see what the gal said about "carrot being trash", because SEO and high converting websites are what we pioneered in this industry and we have the data and results across thousands of clients to prove it. 

If someone searches a motivated house seller phrase like "sell my house fast [insert your location/state/city etc]" you'll usually find 3-8 Carrot client websites controlling page 1 in Google in most every city in America and now up in Canada. I took a screenshot of the Google analytics from our system just now and it shows the #1 source of leads through our Carrot sites is Google organic search from SEO. Of the 650k+ leads this past year our clients pulled in, 213,950 are from SEO (this doesn't include phone call leads, which is usually from 30-50% of leads on a site). 

I'd love to dive in to see what you had a chance to execute from our Evergreen Marketing plan as I could probably pretty quickly diagnose what needs to be done to really dial things in and get the momentum building. 

At a high level its this:
1. Launch the Carrot Lead Gen Hub/Website
2. Use our SEO tools to determine the best SEO keywords to go after in your market
3. Customize the content so it's 30-50% unique and build out your local photos on the site, About page, etc. 
4. Create location pages for each location/city/state you buy houses in (or as an agent, that you serve clients in). Start with the top 5 and then add a few each quarter from there. 
5. Start to build your backlinks to the website (we have services for this in our marketplace to help those who have a budget to hire it out vs. doing the world yourself). 
    - I always like to start w/ Citations. 30-50 citations on local business listing websites. 
    - Get the Google My Business profile going and link it to your Carrot site
    - Then start to build links each month. This is the tedious part of SEO, but usually in most markets a few really good quality backlinks is far more powerful than a bunch. I'd suggest to never buy links from Fivver or places like Upwork. Use tools like HelpAReporterOut, and we have services or we can refer people to services to hire out the backlink building. 
6. As momentum builds on the SEO side over that 6-12 months, I always like to kick up a Google PPC campaign as it's the most consistent and predictable way to generate leads online that are very high quality in general. We find about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 leads turns to a deal right now on Google PPC. 

SEO is a good bit of work. 

Carrot takes care of the fast loading website, the proper high converting and SEO optimized website structure, proper content structure (our sites come w/ stock content which is a great guide for you to customize your contnet to stand out) etc. But unless the location pages are built out properly using our training (or our service) and backlinks are built... then SEO especially in difficult markets is difficult.

Carrot just makes SEO easier and more effective vs going w/ a custom site or our competitors (like LeadPropeller). 

I'd love to dig in so I can see where things went wrong as it's almost always something simple, or backlinks weren't built properly. But the overwhelming proof for how effective Carrot is for SEO is all over the internet. I'm always a data guy and happy to share any data or learnings I have that can help show what's working right now in this market to get leads online. 

On the guru you paid $5k to, who did you pay $5k to for an SEO class? The only paid SEO training we have costs $99, and our content pro plan includes free weekly coaching calls, so if you paid $5k or more for an SEO training, it was likely far more than needed to be paid. 

We're here for you if we're able still help man! 

@Michael Ward I know it's been a bit since you asked the question and you likely already found a great solution for you, but happy to dive in and answer any questions you have! 

At a high level, like @Bruce Lynn mentioned, Carrot has focused on dominating the space of generating motivated house seller leads through Google and paid ads. That's our jam and we've grown to be the largest in the real estate investor space in that industry. Where Zillow controls retail buyer searches in google (think "homes for sale in seattle"), Carrot clients control motivated house seller searches in Google (think "sell my house fast [city]" "we buy houses [location]" etc etc). 

So a couple years back we discovered that a ton of our investor clients were also agents, and they were asking us how they could use Carrot as an agent, because Carrot worked so well for them on the investor side. So we started toying w/ agent sites and I'll be 100% frank and honest. The initial concept we had was to go to agents w/ the exact same model we'd proven and pioneered in the investor spaec to get sellers... and the more agents we talked to... the more we were getting pushback that the sites "had to have IDX" for property listings. This was against our philosophy on what our data showed would work the best, but we took the advice and added it and many other features the average agent was asking about. What happened was we built an agent site that was frankly a subpar version of an agent site vs. what was already out there. It's working well for many of our agent clients, really well, but not up to my standards of being "the best on the market". 

So recently we went back to our roots and asked... "What is it that Carrot is the best at?". And it's generating high quality motivated seller leads through Google. We own that space. We've proven our model for the past 10 years in that area. 

So what we're not pivoting back to is our roots... to build out agent focused sites, specifically for agents who are "hybrid or hybrid curious" (Meaning they also are investors and want to attract motivated house sellers as well), and who are focused on wanting to pull in sellers vs. buyers. Any agent site can pull in buyers. But sellers is what we specialize in. So we're working w/ some of the top eXp agents in the country to really dial in the seller focused agent site, but using our 10 years of experience and over 5million leads generated in the motivatd seller department. 

If that's what you're looking for, I'm happy to dig in and show you what we're doing and the data behind it.

Where the investor side of our product is proven and we're continuing to hone and innovate there (most website companies in the investors space have modeled their sites and concepts after Carrot, but are usually 6-12 months behind Carrot on the performance side of things). On the agent side, we're working to nail a seller focused site that also attracts motivated sellers who don't want to list. 

Hit me up anytime y'all!