OnCarrot.com - Has anyone used for their site?
Investor · Boone, NC · Member since 2014 · 14 posts · 2 votes
Has anyone used oncarrot.com for their site? Any other sites that I should be looking at....just looking for a template to get my site off the ground.
I've also looked at investorpro.com and, of course, just grabbing a WP theme and creating a site.
Any feedback would be much appreciated.
A web site is a web site, but there are web site's that work and those that don't.
Oncarrot.com, like so many website developers, offer templates. The question you should ask them before proceeding, is: Are their pages created with frames or tables?
Frames cannot be penetrated by search engine spiders, so any content (text) will not be used for organic optimization, whereas text contained in tables, can. (Search engines look at frames, the same way they see images... as whole objects).
Secondly, ditch whatever text comes with your template and employ a professional writer to create your verbiage. Using www.Copyscape.com, you can see how many people share the same text on template sites and search engines actually penalize web sites, where text is duplicated (such as franchise sites).
Thirdly, when you create your 'keywords', make certain that those same keywords appear in the first paragraph of your Home page *AND* on your About page.
I hope this has helped.
:)
A web site is a web site, but there are web site's that work and those that don't.
Oncarrot.com, like so many website developers, offer templates. The question you should ask them before proceeding, is: Are their pages created with frames or tables?
Frames cannot be penetrated by search engine spiders, so any content (text) will not be used for organic optimization, whereas text contained in tables, can. (Search engines look at frames, the same way they see images... as whole objects).
Secondly, ditch whatever text comes with your template and employ a professional writer to create your verbiage. Using www.Copyscape.com, you can see how many people share the same text on template sites and search engines actually penalize web sites, where text is duplicated (such as franchise sites).
Thirdly, when you create your 'keywords', make certain that those same keywords appear in the first paragraph of your Home page *AND* on your About page.
I hope this has helped.
:)
Thanks for the tips, Althea.
@Tyler Brunson I think BP member @Scott Costello uses it. Maybe he wouldn't mind sharing his experience.
I'm in a very competative market. I think it would cost more than it's worth for my website to rank on the front page of google here in Miami. It would require 1-2k in SEO monthly for at least a year. You gotta pick your battles...
So I got an oncarrot site at $30 a month as an alternative.It gets the job done. It's on my business cards and all of my marketing material.
It only took 20 minutes to set up.I haven't customized a single word of it. Haven't had the time to. You can check it out at [REMOVED]
I HIGHLY reccomend it if you are just starting out and want a web presence that helps with credibility with your prospects and fellow colleages. It's plug and play.
@elio Levy:
The fact is that you are sharing text that hundreds of others are using, which does not separate you from the herd. If you did not customize the FAQ's, you must be modeling your business on someone else's. The Testimonial page is very misleading, as it consists not of Testimonials but simply quotes by notable people.
If you are getting business from this web site, do yourself a favor and change the verbiage - you'll get even MORE business!
I admit my site is very basic and I barely use it. I was just showing him what a basic, unedited oncarrot.com site looks like. Each and every word and photo on the site is customizable so he can make it as large or small as he wants it to be. In my opinion it's by far the best bang for his buck.
I'm not interested in shelling out 30k in SEO to have my page rank locally. If that were the goal we'd be using a different system. So keywords and verbiage don't matter at all to me at all.
Houseofhomes isn't geared towards Investors - It's for agents and brokers. Not suited for my particular application.
@Tyler Brunson like @Ibrahim Hughes mentioned I do use investorcarrot.com for my websites. They have expanded their offerings since they were just oncarrot. The site is based off a template but they do give you lightly customized stock content that uses Your target areas, phone number and company name. They also have a very good 2 phase contact form scheme plus a follow up email that helps determin the motivation of the lead.
The website is very SEO friendly and they are improving things all the time. Now even after your site is up and running you will have to put in work to get it to rank high in google if you want to get organic traffic. Creating content each month for the site as well as building back links.
If you just want a site to point people too from your marketing then you'll be good to go. I want my site to get to the top spot in google for my target areas so I put in a lot of work. But I think that is the way to go for my situation.
In the end investor carrot is a very good solution for building out a website for real estate website. I'm actually simultaneously building my own site from scratch with the help of an SEO company to see how it compares to investor carrot sites. No conclusion yet as I'm still only a few months into the creation process
Here is my investor carrot website....
[REMOVED]
@Ibrahim S thanks for the tip.
@Elio Levy great feedback...thanks. The moderator removed your site's link. Can you send it to me in a PM?
@Scott Costello BTW, I enjoy your blog. I just downloaded your Lead Manager....looking forward to testing it.
@Darrell Shepherd Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.
Great thread :-)
Hey Tyler, Trevor here with InvestorCarrot.
I just wanted to chime in here. Honestly, it's cool seeing some Carrot members jump in here and let you know their experience. That's the best way to get a good feel for a product and how a company operates.
Thanks @Scott Costello , @Darrell Shepherd and @Elio Levy for the kudos. It means a lot.
One thing I did want to throw in here for food for thought though... @Althea Garner you hit the nail on the head that updating the testimonials page, personalizing the about page, and tweaking some other things is really recommended (whether you're looking at SEO or not. It's important for building credibility of course too).
But, on the content side of things... it's been really interesting seeing the data come in from our 500+ members... and we're continually testing and tweaking things to make the system overall more effective for members.
We actually have 4 different rotations of "stock content" for each type of website, we "personalize" each website with location specific info for their market, their company, etc...
... their title tags are optimized for their local market, etc.
I'm an SEO guy by necessity... because over the years I had to learn SEO to get traffic to my own websites... and I have a full-time SEO team here at Carrot...
... and duplicate content has come up more than once as a potential concern.
The other real estate investor website systems out there give every member the same content (no matter what area they invest in). Which of course isn't good.
We've put in a few automated steps to help get members websites at least "localized" a bit even if they choose not to customize their content at all... and because of this automated personalization that we do on every website... plus our guidance to members to customize some of their content... we're not seeing the duplicate content penalty pop up.
We're seeing members in Sacramento rank in the top 3 for terms like "we buy houses sacramento" with the same unchanged "stock content" as someone in Baltimore or Jacksonville, or Birmingham (etc. etc.) with the same unchanged (or slightly changed) stock content.
I think where there could be an issue is if you're in the same exact city as another Carrot member who is already ranking very high with their website... it would be advisable to tweak some of the content for sure.
But ya, we've reviewed the dup content stuff w/ top SEO advisors and they're all saying that they're seeing the same thing... that unless the duplicate content is on the same domain name... they're just not seeing much if any penalty at all.
All of this to say... with Carrot our content is written to give a jumpstart in rankings... and many members rank very high with no content tweaks... but we do advise members to customize their content to make it more personal, add in some testimonials, some info about yourself to build that connection with the website visitor, and to tweak some content here and there at a minimum. We haven't seen an instance where a major content overhaul was needed to avoid dup content.
Hope that helps!
This thread has revealed some interesting and valuable insights into web design for the investor.
I have been using the sites for a couple of months now so mine are still pretty new. But I love the product and I have written a review - pro's and con's over on my blog.
Sharon
Funny, Investor Carrot just emailed me about advertising on my blog and now this pops up the next day. It sounds like they are a decent site from the comments.
FYI, you guys don't have to spend thousands of dollars on SEO to rank on search engines. Google is constantly changing their formulas to reward the sites with the best content and information, not the sites that spend the most money (unless they are directly paying for advertising on Google). If you write a couple articles a month you should see search engine resluts.
I definitely agree with @Mark Ferguson about google doing a lot better job of rewarding sites that put out great, consistent content.
I'm about to sign up for investrocarrot. I love their designs and the option for content. I previously signed up with another site that offers template websites for real estate investors. Very cheap but the support is BAD. The sites look dated too. Just asked for a refund since they give a 60 days "No questions asked" guarantee. Hope I don't get burned.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this topic. Very informative!
Hi, as an SEO guy I am curious if Investor Carrot leverages all their user sites in a VPN scenario, passing link love page rank of older members through to newer ones. THAT would be an upsell that would justify not having control over the server side and being committed long term to IC....??
As an owner of an SEO company with many clients in the REI industry, I can say that Investor Carrot is by far the best website solution that I've seen to date. It's easy to work with for people who want to get up and running out of the gate and it's flexible enough for experienced site builders and "SEO'ers" to really be able to get additional power out of it.
Definitely worth the money (in my opinion); I have no connection with IC, in fact, we are "friendly competitors" in some area... but, the facts are the facts!!!
I have used them for a little over a month. My wife does not like Oncarrot, she calls it my mistress. She says all I talk about is her (my site). The site is kind of like that big calculator you had for calculus class back in the early 90's. Yea, you can add 2+2 all day long but if you learn a just a couple other functions you can do so much more. I fished out that old calculator the other day. A TI-85, I never learned how to make money with that calculator. The Carrot site, for me, is like that calculator. If you put it in the drawer and forget about it nothing will happen. It is not a pill that makes you taller or skinny
Out of the box it works. I have chosen to follow some of carrot's suggestions and do some SEO myself. I am internet-tarded. I have to ask question almost everyday. They have live people (Jake ) that answer question realtime.( Not wait on a return an email in 24 hours.) He will either hop in my site and fix my issue or tell me the steps to do it myself.
I've used them for about 9 months for my home buying website. Private message me and I'll send you the link to the website. (It's not my Chandler Properties website.) I have had an overall good experience. It does come with a default template, but as @Trevor Mauch said you need to take the time to customize the site content to better fit your market and optimize your website. It uses Wordpress so it is relatively easy to learn how to use.
Probably the most valuable part of the website is the support and online Tutorials that are provided. They not only provide info about how to set up your site, but also teach you how to better your search engine rankings. You will have to put in time to make your website work well, but they provide great resources.
Trevor also hosts weekly Mastermind calls which are very informative. They often uses customers' websites as examples and do updates on the calls to better optimize the sites. Overall I'm happy with the product and recommend it.
Just catching up on this thread.
Thanks @Michael Cardini I appreciate the kind words man! We still need to connect! Time got away from me. Would love to see what you're doing and see if it's something of value to our members long-term.
@Nettles Mason Haha, we LOVE having you around man. People who take action like you are always fun as heck. We can't wait until you close that first deal. I know you have a couple under contract now from your Carrot sites and marketing you've implemented, so when you close one we'll have to have a celebration on our next mastermind call man!
@Michael Rogers Ya the training and weekly mastermind calls for members are fun as heck. Like you say, that's really where the rubber meets the road. Our system makes it easier for you to rank well... and we focus on conversion rate optimization (that's built into our system and we're continually improving)... but ya to get leads ya have to have traffic. And to get traffic ya have to do some sort of marketing (SEO, PPC, craigslist, offline, etc.). And that's where we focus the training and mastermind calls on. Glad you enjoy them!
It's been a fun ride with our members and will be a great 2015 for you guys!
Hey @Trevor Mauch. Step 1 is completed. I got a Carrot site (HERE) and now I am trying to figure out if SEO/PPC is a good idea to get started in my Charleston, SC market.. I have a friend who has spent around 6figs on online it and it failed in AZ. So he sticks with DM.
I currently send 18,000 post cards a month, and it produces a good amount of leads, but very few of these leads are motivated. We are barely doing enough deals to stay above water. I feel I'm chasing my tail. Profiting, then back in the hole, profiting, then back in the hole. My Acq Mgr's are stressed with the leads and are working a lot, but not closing enough.
I want to incorporate online marketing, so I can grab a piece of that market, but I want to verify that Charleston, SC is a good fit for it before I invest the money. What are your thoughts? How can I verify that? Then what's my next action step (in your opinion) for getting my site out there? I have a VA that needs more to do, so maybe she can help.
They're providing a CDN which theoretically should make for a fast site. Services like cloud flare start at $20. Then there is the maintenance of plugins and cost to update themes for Wordpress. Lastly, the site design and content. $2,000 an up. To make Wordpress SEO compliant takes some customization.
This definitely seems reasonable.
This is out of the box. Make sure your content is unique.
SEO take as a minimum of 6 months to see results and yes depending on the search queries could take a year.
Queries and search behavior change all the time. There are search queries not in Google's index so you won't see historical volume.
Although link profiles are still a big part but it's not everything. Focus on being a resource and building a great site.
SEO is in an investment in market share and does turn "evergreen". You have to maintain it,. If you'd like to read a guide, Moz SEO Guide is a great resource to start.