Is anyone using Minute Pages for lead generation?

[Ryan Cramer]

I came across this program today and was wondering if anyone has any experience or feedback on their service. 

[Trevor Mauch]

Hey @Ryan Cramer! Hey hey! I just had a chance to see this. I see you joined Carrot so welcome aboard my friend! 

High level, MP is run by 3 great guys and experienced real estate dudes. Building what we've built at Carrot isn't easy and it's cool seeing them make a go of tackling the same challenge we did when we set out and what we've been focused on solving for the industry the last 8 years. 

The main thing I always like to tell people is this:

1. Align w/ a company you resonate with values wise first. I always love to be a part of helping people achieve their mission and as a customer I am pumped when I'm excited about the mission and values of the companies I work with. So dive into those and pick the company you resonate with most there. 

2. Results/Track record of performance: Above all, performance is most important. Aesthetic is easy, performance is hard. With websites performance is broken down into 3 areas:
- Speed (how fast is the website.). This impacts both SEO ranking ability and website conversion
- SEO ranking ability (many say they're SEO optimized, but the only thing you can trust is the results you see in Google, not the claims)
- Conversion rate (this is critical and what we've pioneered across the industry, but there are so many nuances on conversion rate). 

I'll dive into each below in a quick video.

3. Support / community / tools to help you succeed: A software tool is only as good as the companies ability to support, innovate, and help you crush it. Having a robust community of those who have had tons of success w/ a tool helps to increase your chances of success  as well. 

Thank you Jonathan (one of the MP owners) for linking up that comparison page. As you know data is king and that's what we've pioneered over the last 8 years. I'm a competitive guy so I always love to battle together so we can together elevate the industry and elevate what investors and agents get.  I want our competitors to be successful because Carrot exists far beyond earning income, we exist to help more people build businesses of freedom and impact, and if MP can help you do that because of some things they've learned from us along the way, that is a HUGE win in my book. A high tide raises all ships. 

In that post though I dove in and ran a comparison myself (we are constantly running performance studies each quarter and each month making speed upgrades, security upgrades, conversion upgrades based on tests, and of course continuing to help our clients rank at the top of Google.)... and the page speeds I see on our end are a good bit different than what MP shows on their Carrot vs. MP comparison page. 

Some pics and a video below. Now... with technology changing all the time and how fast we're iterating and improving... what shows on a page speed screenshot today will likely be a good bit different in 6 months. So the bottom line is both systems are fast, but in all the tests I ran below Carrot at the moment I'm typing this tends to be faster page speed wise. 

In the testing I ran on Googles page speed tool and gtmetrix, out of the box our Carrot site seemed to have a solid performance edge. 

I popped a couple screenshots below. 

Out of the box Carrot:

GTmetrix: Carrot site out of the box - Desktop

Google PageSpeed insights - mobile: Carrot out of the box motivated seller site

Shows a 100 on SEO score, 100 on best practices, 96 on accessibility, and "67" on performance. 

You may be asking... "a 67 on performance... isn't that bad?". 

For context, Google's page speed tool is built for developers, not for marketers, so performance for them is measured quite a bit different in the ways we'd measure performance for SEO ranking and website conversion rate. 

Example, you'd think that Google itself would rate 100/100 on performance on their own tool right? Well, here's a screenshot of a Pagespeed report on Google.com itself. 

Google.com is an extremely simple page, almost nothing on it, and it is a 76. So Carrot's overall performance score is quite high. 

Another comparison... SearchEngineJournal.com (THE online authority on SEO, their performance score is 47. So Carrot sites crush search engine journal). 

Carrot Desktop PageSpeed Insights Score: Nearly 100 on all 4 metrics on desktop

MinutePages out of the box PageSpeed Scores:

Google PageSpeed tool mobile = 23 overall performance score, 77 SEO, 77 accessibility, 92 best practices. 

MinutePages Desktop Score - 73 SEO, 55 performance, 79 accessibility

How to look at performance on a website... 

When looking at performance on a website page speed is one factor. It's an important factor, but it's a single factor. 

Yes, fast sites are good for Google and SEO (ranking high in Google), which is a reason why Carrot sites overwhelmingly dominate google search rankings for motivated house seller phrases. Yes fast websites help increase the conversion of a visitor to a lead. 

But page speed has a diminishing return as you get below 2.4 second load time when it comes to SEO and conversion. 

For example, you can have very little content on a page and few pictures and optimize for page speed... but if there isn't enough content on the page to build trust, credibility, and nudge the prospect down the path to not just turn into a lead but also a deal... then that extra .25 second page speed you got by cutting all of your content out and making it look pretty will likely reduce your overall conversion rate and will torpedo your chances of ranking well in Google. 

But on the SEO side of things, Carrot sites give a huge edge in Google search rankings over all other platforms including MP (look through the search results for motivated house seller phrases in your market and see how many are Carrot v.s other platforms. It is because of the performance edge we've innovated into our platform and our support). 

I will tell you though that MP has some really nice looking designs and the lead stalk feature is really cool. We actually have lots of our customers testing that same feature on their Carrot sites through 3rd party tools that do the same thing. They were able to put the script on their site from a 3rd party vendor who supplies the IP address data and they have it running on their Carrot sites. We're still getting mixed results on the IP data lookup feature as the data is a bit hit and miss accuracy wise and you end up getting a lot of very unqualified leads that now are going into a CRM or having to be followed up w/ by a human. A really cool feature though and we're continuing to test it. Once we find it delivers an overall higher ROI for our clients, it'll be an add-on people can add in the Carrot platform, but until then we're just guiding people to add it onto their Carrot sites from the 3rd party vendors.

@Darrell Essex Hit me up if we can help in any way man! We're here for ya!