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!

[Luke Rorech]

I looked into it quite a bit and ultimately decided against it because of price. I think the better bet is seeing if your local realtor association has a vendor that builds websites for it's members at a good rate and then invest some time into your own SEO. 

[Bruce Lynn]

Seems like a great website for investors and I've known several who used it.

The sites they had set up seemed great.

Haven't heard of any agents using it, but if it is similar to the investor websites, I would think it should be good.

Does your brokerage not have software for you to use?   That seems like one of the basics?

[Gearold White]

@Michael Ward I recently used carrot. In fact I paid for a popular guru's SEO class and got ripped off over 5k. Carrot says it takes 6 mnths to get your first lead, which is reasonable. After 7 and 8 mnths of OUTSTANDING customer service. All of a sudden I haven't heard back from carrot on why I have.kt received 1 lead and no traffic after doing EVERYTHING carrot and this SEO scam told me to do.

I finally found a person to work on SEO for me. She looked at the back side of my website and showed me proof of carrot being trash. STAY AWAY. Build your own. I would love to mention the guys name. But I'm trying to build a name for myself and with the way SEO is I don't need some hack of a guru attacking me.

[Jake Baker]

It takes more than just setting up a carrot site and forgetting about it for 6 months then expecting leads. This may well work in a niche market. Otherwise, you have to advertise your domain in other ways. Direct mail, email, SMS, etc. We get leads to our Lead Propeller site which is a similar company to Carrot.

[Jake Soper]

Carrot can be a powerful tool in conjunction with paid marketing, but its not a set n forget solution as Jake mentioned. You need to redirect prospects to that page via marketing, ads, seo.

You also need to customize the site from the boilerplate site structure they provide you. If you don't, you run the risk of having a site that looks, feels, and performs like a website from 2007.

Like any tool, you need to know how to use it!

[Annemarie E Latulip]

I've been using Carrot for about 2 years now. I am an agent in the Boston area. I love it. Up until now I had been using company given sites. This is incredibly better for many reasons. As was mentioned above, its not just about publishing your site and hoping for leads. Its about continually adding and creating content on your site that is evergreen. As you grow your site by use of this content, also including keywords relative to your location and niche (which carrot allows you to choose a bunch to rank for) the more you do this then the more visible your site will be on Google, and of course the more leads you will receive. I've gotten quite a few. Happy to chat about this in more detail.

[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! 

[Chip Carmack]

@Trevor Mauch Heard you speak with Chasen Chess and talked to one of your reps this evening and am excited to be signing up for your "Hybrid" plan. The analogy I've heard for a website is a "For Sale" sign in the middle of a corn field. WHO sees it? With literally MILLIONS of sites on Google searches, something has to be DONE to stand out to Google (and their roving "spiders"). Connecting Google Profile was a great idea. I'd also recommend a YouTube channel (Google is #1 search engine and YouTube is owned by Google so they promote sites tied to YT). One tip. Don't make videos about You. Make helpful videos (preferably interesting ones) that highlight the area (pros and cons is one idea). I have decided NOT to do an IDX feed. Quite honestly, is someone going to my site to look up houses? No. They're going for "credibility". To see what I'm about. If they want to look at houses, they go to ZILLOW (I read that OVER 90% of buyers go to Zillow during the buying process. So I'll let them look at houses on Zillow while I sell them my listing ;) 

[Nate Sanow]

Quote from @Annemarie E Latulip:

I've been using Carrot for about 2 years now. I am an agent in the Boston area. I love it. Up until now I had been using company given sites. This is incredibly better for many reasons. As was mentioned above, its not just about publishing your site and hoping for leads. Its about continually adding and creating content on your site that is evergreen. As you grow your site by use of this content, also including keywords relative to your location and niche (which carrot allows you to choose a bunch to rank for) the more you do this then the more visible your site will be on Google, and of course the more leads you will receive. I've gotten quite a few. Happy to chat about this in more detail.

 @Annemarie E Latulip. Hey there this is really good. To be clear, your website is strictly an agent focused website not investor, right ? Are the leads you get mostly buyers or a mix of buyers and sellers? Just curious, I need to get a website i am just torn on which way I’ll go.

[Trevor Mauch]

@Nate Sanow correct Annemarie’s site is a pure agent site. 

Here’s another agent focused site that does really really well (they get a lot of leads and ranking really well in Google)

https://www.anthonybeckham.com/

hopefully that helps! 👊🙌🏻🥕

[Kobe Xin]

@Charlie Cameron has been using Carrot for his real estate team's lead generation in the past few months...any thoughts on this?