Carrot Websites vs. Custom Websites for Real Estate
Carrot Websites vs. Custom Websites
Custom websites may look nice, but they’re expensive, bad at lead generation, and difficult to maintain. Carrot real estate websites have one goal: get you motivated leads.
Carrot websites are built for lead generation. Period.
There’s a reason that we specifically call Carrot sites “lead generation websites” — because that’s what they’re designed to do. We have spent 10+ years testing and optimizing Carrot website templates for peak lead conversion. Everything from what elements to include on a page, where forms should appear, what information those forms should ask for, and even the order of the pages in the navigation. It all makes a difference when you’re trying to generate leads, and it’s all baked into Carrot templates from the start.
That’s why successful real estate investors prefer Carrot websites versus custom sites. A custom site might look nice, but if it doesn’t attract traffic and turn that traffic into leads, it’s not fulfilling its goal. Would you rather have a site that stands out or one that makes you money?
At the end of the day, you need a website that generates leads. If your website isn’t optimized to convert visitors into leads, every missed opportunity is a direct hit to your potential revenue. With Carrot, the focus is on making every visit count, ensuring that your site pays for itself through its performance.
I never got any leads from my old custom websites. They looked great, they just didn’t perform.
Mike Wall
EZ Sell Homebuyers
I had a PPC vendor who built a super techy site that they swore would outconvert my Carrot site — it didn’t. I paid $5000 to have a custom site designed that was really pretty, but I got less leads. My expensive, pretty site was converting at 1-2% on SEO when my Carrot site was converting at like 8.5% on SEO.
Ryan Dossey
RyanDossey.com
How Carrot Works
How Carrot Works from Carrot on Vimeo
Carrot Websites vs. Custom Websites
| Custom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Fully customizable for a totally unique look | ||
| High converting website designed to generate leads | ||
| Ready to launch in minutes | ||
| No tech skills or contractor required for setup | ||
| Plugin and security updates done automatically | ||
| SEO optimized starter content so you don’t need to write an entire website from stratch | ||
| Built-in SEO tools & dashboards | ||
| A full suite of content creation tools to boost SEO | ||
| Automatically created Location Pages to save countless hours | ||
| Forms in the right spots & connected to a built-in lead manager | ||
| Performance reporting dashboards |
“Unlike custom sites requiring endless trial and error, Carrot is built specifically for real estate investors.”
Keith Sant
Kind House Buyers
Launching a Carrot Website vs. a Custom Website
If you’ve never created a website before, you may be surprised by how long it takes and what goes into its maintenance. Carrot saves you time and money, while giving you a site that performs better right out of the box.
Custom Real Estate Websites
Before launching your site:
- Choose a hosting platform
- Hire a web designer and developer
- Go back and forth on edits and revisions until you’re happy
- Make sure your site has an SSL Security Certificate
- Do keyword research to find the best keywords for SEO
- Write original copy for your entire site from scratch
- Choose a forms provider and add forms to the key areas of your site (without any in-app guidance regarding best location for conversion)
- Connect those forms to your CRM or lead manager
- Create additional pages to target different locations
- Get a separate keyword rank tracking tool to monitor your SEO
Time until published: Months
Maintaining your site:
- Pay someone to maintain your site (update plugins, apply security updates, fix any page speed issues, etc.)
- Contact your web manager and wait for a response if there’s an issue
- Contract a new web designer/developer for future changes, updates, and additions
- Manually research, write, and publish new pages and blog posts regularly for SEO
Cost: Expensive
Carrot Real Estate Websites
Before launching your site:
- Get a custom AI-generated site designed for your business
- Add your brand colors, logo, and images
Time until published: Minutes
Maintaining your site:
- Use the in-app Keyword Explorer to find new keywords
- Monitor your SEO success with the Keyword Rank Tracker & other in-app performance dashboards
- Use Carrot’s included Site Audits to identify and fix any issues (or contact our Customer Support team!)
Carrot takes care of site security, maintenance, and foundational performance for you!
Cost: Included!
Carrot websites have the best SEO & search rankings
Carrot websites dominate search rankings for common real estate keywords like “sell my house fast” and “sell my house for cash” thanks to years of optimization and built-in SEO and content tools that help you stand out. In a study of 225 U.S. cities to see which websites appeared as the top search result for the search term “sell my house fast,” Carrot websites appeared at the top of the page most often.
The higher you rank in search results, the better your chances of attracting motivated leads. With a custom site, you’d have to figure out SEO on your own or pay someone to handle it for you while Carrot users already have a head start.
Carrot sites are great because you can literally have a full-fledged website up and running within 10 minutes. Like no joke… The best thing about Carrot websites is they take the headache out of the equation. You don’t have to figure out web hosting, installing WordPress, building forms, picking a theme, writing initial content, initial designs, and so much more. It just works.
Jason Moss
MossTech
59%
of #1 search results for “sell my house fast” are Carrot sites
50%
of the top 3 search results are captured by Carrot sites across 225 U.S. Markets
I want to acknowledge one of the most lucrative tools in my arsenal of marketing. Carrot websites provide more tools, education, content and overall value of any website service I have ever been with. Besides the excellent customer service, the website is capable of producing more traffic than any I’ve been with in the past. And with more feature updates always coming, I don’t see how anyone can even compete with them. Thanks Carrot! You ROCK!
Jeff Steup
Built-in Carrot website features
With a custom website, that’s all you get … just a website. With Carrot, you get a website optimized for performance and lead conversion, plus additional tools and features that help you drive business and improve over time.
Real Estate Websites
Start off strong with a website designed for attracting leads. Templates include SEO-optimized starter copy to help you launch fast.
Drag & Drop Editor
Customize the look of your website by adding different pre-built elements for content, testimonials, FAQs, About Us pages, and more!
SEO Tools
Find the best keywords to rank for, make sure they’re applied correctly, and watch how your search rankings change over time with built-in SEO tools.
Automated Content
Regularly publishing new content on your site is important for SEO. Carrot makes it easy with a variety of content creation and editing tools.
Call Tracking
Understand where every lead comes from … even the ones who call. Carrot offers call tracking for your website and other marketing campaigns.
Real Estate CRM
Don’t just generate leads, manage them through the entire deal pipeline! Carrot leads automatically feed into your real estate CRM, complete with AI features.
See what Carrot can do for your lead generation.
Carrot websites have generated more than 1 million leads and counting. Our leads convert to deals 7x better than non-Carrot leads and have 2.5x the profitability.
Are you ready to improve your lead conversion with a website that actually works?
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Carrot more affordable than a custom website?
In many cases, Carrot websites are more affordable than custom websites. With a custom site, you have to pay for website hosting, design, development, and ongoing maintenance, plus additional tools or plugins for SEO optimization. Additionally, custom real estate websites often don’t convert as well or generate as many leads as Carrot websites. So you have to ask yourself, how much potential revenue are you losing because of a poorly performing custom website?
How quickly can I launch a Carrot website?
Carrot websites can be launched in just a few minutes!
Can I customize the look of my Carrot site?
YES! Many people mistakenly believe that all Carrot websites look the same. But the drag-and-drop editor allows you to add features to your webpages and customize the look and feel. Your site will look unique to your brand!
Do Carrot websites come with a CRM?
A free CarrotCRM account is included with all Carrot web memberships! If you want to unlock more CRM tools as your company grows, you can upgrade your CarrotCRM subscription at any time.
Trusted by thousands of real estate professionals.
There’s a reason the top investors and agents choose Carrot. We’ve helped them grow their real estate businesses by providing industry leading tactics, training, and support to give them a predictable lead generation pipeline that increases profit. Carrot helps create businesses of impact and freedom and we’d love to help you too.