Investor carrot reviews online praise their cookie-cutter real estate investor websites – but most are affiliates of Carrot real estate and get paid to do so. Let’s take a deep dive into the unbiased & technical review of Investor carrot websites, and why your REI business can not achieve the coveted first-page if you’re using Carrot’s website builders.
What is Carrot Real Estate?
Established almost two decades ago, Carrot is one of the major real estate wholesaling websites providers, enabling real estate investors & agents to quickly launch an online presence by using their ready-made real estate investor website templates. Investor carrot pricing seems to match their level of quality, which is to say that a few hundreds bucks a month will get you one or more shoddy looking websites (which is by design, as they claim that it improves your lead generation conversion rate).
Although a ‘cookie-cutter’ strategy is usually frowned upon by Google, we noticed that many of their clients were ranking high on the first page (sometimes overthrowing established multinational behemoths that have large SEO budgets behind them), by virtually having the same identical site structure and keyword targets throughout multiple web properties.
Before we jump into the detailed analysis report, let’s summarize some key points about the pros and cons of their existing strategy.
Investor Carrot Main Benefit
Proximity and local relevancy
Most of the high search rankings come from an overly optimized local SEO strategy, targeting specific areas with buyer intent keywords. When localized, these high-competition high-demand keywords will be treated as separate search queries by Google, thus making way for more locally relevant results to show up higher (and most of the time they’re categorized as “local pack keywords” since there will be Google My Business map results on the first page).
This is an efficient local SEO targeting strategy commonly referred to as “city pages” (targeting “buyer keyword + location”), however it raises the issue of being seen as “doorway pages” if not implemented correctly.
Carrot Websites Main Drawback
Investor Carrot websites utilize the same templates, the same website structure and quite similar topic & content development throughout most of their properties. This can actually result in a lower conversion rate, since prospective customers (homeowners looking to sell their houses) will effectively stumble upon the same shoddy looking websites from multiple businesses in their local area.
And if that wasn’t enough, it’s virtually impossible for newer Carrot lead generation websites to break into the first page, considering that only the largest (and biggest spenders) of Carrot’s customers can achieve that. Most of the smaller Investor Carrot websites will be missing out on hundreds of potential homeowners in their immediate area that are looking to sell their homes.
This is by default a design flaw from Carrot company, since they’re effectively pitching their customers against-each other in search engine rankings with the same targets. From an SEO strategy perspective, it’s an inherent conflict of interest (like a lawyer working for both sides in a case).
At Outrank.Website, we recognize the importance of an exclusivity agreement to protect our clients’ interests. That means that when we sign a contract together, the client obtains exclusive rights for their target market, ensuring that no conflict of interest arises in the future. Even if a competitor approaches us — we respectfully decline.
Learn more about our hyper targeted, result-driven Real Estate lead generation campaigns with our dedicated SEO Services for REI.
With that being said, let’s jump into our in-depth, data-driven SEO performance analysis of Investor Carrot REI websites.
The site structure revolves around creating separate landing pages for each of the targeted locations (in this case cities), optimized for the parent topic and main buyer intent keywords. The homepage in itself acts as a giant landing page for the main location that the business is targeting; this is done on purpose, since the homepage is the most powerful property. Therefore, by targeting the most competitive location through the homepage, there’s a higher chance of ranking for those keywords. There are some secondary pages that are part of the sales funnel in the customer journey and thus add to the topical relevance of the site, however they are not primary ranking targets since they’re targeting high difficulty keywords. OnCarrot is using a managed CMS environment for their client websites, managing the server and back-end architecture themselves, while clients have the liberty of customizing the front-end look of the website. We did not stumble upon any major technical bottlenecks, however there were a few key issues that were identified on most of the websites: While the landing pages themselves are not too big in size (generally over 1mb, depending on the size of assets), and there is a clearly optimized linear waterfall based on the loaded requests, however most pages consistently score low in terms of loading speed and user experience on mobile. There are some minor suggestions that would lead to a decrease in loading speed, such as properly sizing images and enabling server-side image compression. A broken linking structure can lead to loss of linkjuice flow and expenditure of your crawling budget for 404s. In some cases, there were links to the property on their domain *.oncarrot.com, rather than the main domain of the client. Some of the external links also resulted in 404, not having been updated in a while. Most clients’ domains that we analyzed were utilizing a fixed WWW version of the domain, with all other domain versions resulting blocked. It’s advisable to 301 redirect all non-working versions of your domain to your main domain name, thus all the linkjuice will naturally flow to your homepage. There were several instances of keyword cannibalization that we identified within some client websites, mostly related to the same structural issue: targeting the same location throughout the homepage as well as on a separate landing page. Naturally this leads to search engines ranking both pages lower than if only one was properly optimized. Probably the single most efficient part of their SEO strategy is the keyword identification part, where these websites have been properly optimized in terms of title, metatags and keyword density. Let’s analyze the general structure of the page titles to better understand how their keyword targeting strategy works. Now obviously not each of the page titles will be like this (although there was one time last year where almost all of the first page titles for these buyer intent keywords were basically the same wording, sometimes inverted, however they got a major hit in a later Google update). The metatags are heavily optimized for optimal keyword targeting as well. The content in general is thin and repetitive, however landing pages consistently list 1’500-2’000+ words, with a well developed inner content structure. Most local landing pages within a website have the same exact content, with only the name of the target location being changed (which does raise the issue of ‘doorway pages’). The blogpost content strategy revolves around throwing out many short (~300 words) articles, while customizing the title and contents to target one specific location. (i.e. “Dealing with $general-issue in $city”). This article covers most of our analysis, however there is one more section that we haven’t discussed here. We found that there is one single missing factor that differentiates the first-page ranking Carrot websites from all the rest. That means that if you are currently utilizing an Investor Carrot website for lead generation, you are potentially missing out on hundreds of local homeowners visiting your website from Google every single month. Our team at Outrank.Website specializes in identifying key market opportunities, executing the right SEO strategy for your business and continuously improving to deliver results. Let’s get in touch for a quick overview call to discuss how we can grow your REI business:Site structure
Technical performance
Keyword targeting
[Parent Topic] IN $LOCATION – [Main Buyer Keyword] IN $LOCATION
Content development