Website design and hosting advice needed

[Elizabeth Wilson]

We currently have an investor carrot site but wondering what other online/web options people have found that work for them and why?  Specifically why did they choose that web service?  Does it affect your SEO? Do you have it integrated into your CRM (Podio, etc)?

Thanks!

[Aaron H.]

@Elizabeth Wilson The short answer is no - all else being equal, the platform you use to produce the site doesn't matter. Google doesn't really think "Oh, this is a Wordpress site, +- 5 points."

To slightly over-simplify things, all web platforms ultimately produce HTML, which is what search engine webcrawlers "read" to look at your site. With enough tweaking, you could produce the exact same rendered HTML output using any platform. You could produce an exact clone of an IC site by hand-writing the HTML in Notepad if you wanted (very bad idea).

What matters for SEO is a long list of factors that the web crawlers use to rank your page - what kind of words are used in headings (that is, what does the page appear to be "about"), what types of phrases and words does the body copy of the site use, how similar is that content to other sites, how many incoming links does the page have from other "high authority" sites, how much traffic are you already getting, how quickly does the page load, how recently was the content updated, how effectively does the site render on a mobile device, etc. etc.

Nobody knows the exact formula for how search engines use those factors, and they change all the time. Staying on top of what currently seems like the optimal way to rank highly is difficult and time consuming.

So, the way in which the platform you use matters is "what tools does this platform give me to make sure that the site I'm building checks all those boxes easily and effectively?"

Wordpress as a platform has a huge number of tools, plugins, and expertise available for hire to ease the burden of doing manual SEO. Those tools are only as good as the person using them.

Other platforms geared more towards drag-and-drop brochure sites with minimal customization options will give you far fewer options.

Services like Investor Carrot do exactly the same things. They just have the expertise to know what works well for real estate investment specific sites and a track record of ranking well. You'll still need to customize your IC site (like Jerryll is suggesting), but it comes more ready out of the box with many of the things that investors are looking for. You ultimately have less tools available for customization than you would with a platform like Wordpress. On the other hand, you may need them less.