Investing in multiple markets doesn’t need to cause a complex website system. Do you need to set up multiple websites, or can you stick with one website? And how do you use your website to scale your business?
In this Carrot Strategy Sketch, Trevor explains what website strategy you need to implement if you invest in multiple markets.
Video Transcription
Hey, guys and gals. This is Trevor with Carrot, and we’re coming at you with something new. We put out a lot of great blog posts and Coaching Calls, and things like that where we get a ton of questions in from investors, just like you, on everything from search engine optimization to pay per click to conversion rate optimization.
Basically, how to make you and your website more effective to grow your business, so one thing that we thought of, we said, “Hey, let’s do question and answers for our customers each week, and we’re going to do them on the whiteboard.”
This is our first episode, so give us feedback below this video, but we’ll dive in.
Website Strategy For Wholesaling In Multiple Markets
If you’re a real estate investor, and you invest in multiple markets, or you want to invest in multiple markets, let’s say you’re in Dallas, Texas. You want to also invest in Houston and San Antonio in different markets or if you’re in Florida.
You want to expand over into different states, like Maryland and then maybe Pennsylvania, as well, do you set up multiple websites, or do you stay with one website? And how do you do that on the website to scale your business?
That’s what we’re going to dive into today, if you have multiple markets, what’s your website strategy? One site or multiple sites?
We’re going to dive in, and take notes on this, because this could be a huge difference between you working too much and getting not as good of a result or just tackling the wrong strategy. We want to get that strategy right from the start.
With this example, we’ve got three different cities so we will go with the three-city strategy right now, okay? We’ll go with…here in Oregon, we live in Oregon. Let’s say we will go after Portland, Salem, and Eugene.
Do We Set Up Different Websites For Each City?
We’ve got city one, city two, and city three. What a lot of people are doing…the reason that we’re doing this Whiteboard Wednesday is they’re setting up multiple websites for each market, and that might sound like a good idea at the start because you go out there and get your domain name for the Eugene market, and one for Portland, and one for Salem, as an example.
That makes a lot of sense search engine optimization-wise, but it’s created way too much work, so we’re going to show you how to consolidate it.
Rather than having a website for city one and a website for city two, and a separate one for city three, we’re going to combine them into just one website.
Consolidate The Number Of Sites
Now here’s one caveat to that. You have to be going after the same type of lead. You don’t want to be combining different websites for seller leads, buyer leads, and for rent to own.
We’re talking about one type of lead here. We’re going to get rid of site number one. We’re also going to get rid of site number three over here.
We’re going to consolidate it all into one site here. There is one site for those three cities and one great example. If you type in anything online, investment properties in whatever city you want to mention…
Type in your own city, and you’ll probably find loopnet.com somewhere in the top three rankings, but it’s not their home page.
It’s always a page set up specifically for that other city. We’re doing the same thing here. You’ve got your homepage here, and the homepage is going to be focusing on your broad market.
If you’re in the Texas or Oregon markets, and all of the cities you invest in are in that market, you want your homepage to focus on the broad market. You could say, “We buy houses, or we’ll buy your house in Oregon,” or “Sell your Oregon house fast,” or something like that. Okay?
We’re not even going to be focusing that homepage on specific cities. Now we can mention those cities that we buy in or sell in, or rent houses in on the homepage, but the overall focus is your broad market.
City Specific Pages
The next thing we’re going to do is just like loopnet.com does; we’re going to make sure that we put our sub-cities or the markets that we will buy or sell houses in or whatever it is that you’re doing somewhere on the website.
If you go to loopnet.com, and you see on the right side of the city-specific areas, you’ll see other areas we have investment properties in, and they list out all of those other markets.
We’re doing the same thing. Here at Carrot, we have it built into your platform to make it easier for you to do that. If you’re not using Carrot, connect with your web guy or hack in and learn the code, or whatever. Put that thing in there, but we make it easy with Carrot.
We’re going to have a…Here’s your Portland city. Here’s your Eugene. Here’s your Salem, or whatever cities you’re going after, or states. We want to have those listed somewhere on your website with a link to that page. That helps you with your search engine optimization in a big way.
Website Maintenance
The next reason why we consolidate these into one website is maintenance. One website is a lot easier to maintain than two, three, four, five, or ten of them, and when you’re building backlinks to your website, if you have five different websites for five different markets, you’re now having to duplicate your search engine optimization efforts five times.
With building everything into one site for that one type of lead, for motivated house sellers for example, now all those backlinks we’re building are working for that one website.
If you want to launch into another market in six months, you launch it on this website. It’s going to give you that search engine optimization power to get that webpage ranking faster.
That’s kind of what we’re talking about here, is we’re building one big asset that, as it gains momentum, really starts to pick up, the performance on the website is going to be way better than having all of your stuff spread out into different websites. Also, you’re just going to get a lot better results.
You’ll get a lot more leads coming through over the long term. You will be closing more of those leads into deals, which equals less work, which is what we’re all looking for. We want to maintain one site per lead type, not fourteen.
What You Need To Do On Your Website
Now you might ask, “What do I need to do on the website?” “How do I implement this?” When you build out those city-specific pages or state-specific pages, whatever they are, you want to make sure that a fancy phrase called the Permalink, which is basically when you go into your browser, you’ve got www.yoursite.com/. Whatever comes after that forward slash is called the permalink. You want to ensure that your permalink has that city and the keywords you’re looking to rank for.
For example, if you’re in the Portland market and set up one of those city-specific landing pages on your overall Oregon website for Portland, you might make the permalink sell your Portland house fast. That will help you optimize that page better, and every other city or state you put on that website will be very similar.
Then the homepage, we already mentioned, makes that broad, so it’s your overall market. If you invest across the entire United States, your homepage should be, “Hey, we buy houses all over the United States,” and then you’ll have different pages for each state or city you invest in to help you get in the search rankings better.
Guiding Visitors To The Right Pages
Then the last thing is the reason that we put these links on the page, just like if you go to loop.net, is because not only does it help guide people toward those pages if they land on your homepage. And if they land on your homepage and see you buy houses in Oregon or sell houses in Oregon, or whatever it is, then they also see the city they’re in, and they’ll click it.
They say, “Okay, they buy houses here,” or “Sell houses here.”
Another reason is search engine optimization. Now Google is going to find your homepage, it’s going to find the links on the page, follow them over there, and it gives you a lot better chance of getting indexed in Google quicker, getting higher in the rankings, and also getting more leads and more traffic through your website.
If you’re investing in multiple markets, this is the strategy.,
Once again, I’m going to recap fast. This applies if you’re going after one lead type. We don’t suggest mixing everything into one website if you also go after buyers and sellers on the same site. We don’t want that. This is one lead type, okay.
Then next, we set up multiple city-specific or state-specific landing pages for each market you’re going to be in. We ensure the permalinks have your keyword and the state in them.
Ensure your homepage is broad for your home market, whatever that market is. If you’re just in Philadelphia, your homepage should focus on Philadelphia.
If you invest all over Pennsylvania, your homepage should be Pennsylvania. If you’re national, your homepage should be national, and then your city-specific ones dive into your locations.
Then from there, get out there and build your SEO, build your backlinks, and things like that that we teach to market your one website. You’re going to get a lot better results.
Please keep sending your questions and give us the comments below. Let us know the next topic you want us to dive into, from advanced to beginner. Let us know. Thank you, guys, for watching this Whiteboard Strategy Sketch, and we’ll talk soon.
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Great White Board Session. I am in the Washington Metropolitan Area which includes Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia so this was right on time. Keep up the good work. You guys are the Best.
Awesome! Glad you liked it Jonathan!!! These whiteboard sessions are pretty fun actually! So we’ll keep doing them and answering your questions!
Great timing! I like the format of the White Board Session – short and sweet! I’m just getting ready to launch a website for the Tulsa, Oklahoma area. What you’ve said here is making me rethink my website. I’ll be contacting you soon!
Good info I only wish I new this strategy when I started all my seo. Seems I have to start fresh because my idea now is multiple markets/states, my current domain locks me into 1 state, ugh! I suggest if you ever think your gonna go multi state then chose a non state specific domain…
Cheers
Trevor, thanks for the very helpful info on wholesaling in multiple markets. The info was very helpful and much needed. BY the way.., Don’t worry about your bald spot, you’re lucky I started going bald at 16.But most importantly I learned.., “It’s not what ON your head, it’s what’s IN your Head” and my friend you’re very smart, so what’s on your head, is a minor issue :)
This was great! loved it. Can we talk about scheduling content? Thanks
Awesome!
Scheduling, content… yep! I’ll put it on my schedule.
Great info Trevor , this has been puzzling me for quite a while….you just answered all my questions ….keep up the good work
Awesome!!!! That’s what these whiteboard are all about! Go get ’em!
I get the gist of the carrotcast but how do I go about changing my home buyer site to a more generic site when my url for the site has my city name in it? Do I start with a new url to have a broader reach?
Great question!
Ya the URL of a site is really important for how easily the site can scale into other markets as you go. If you ever feel you’re going to branch out to other cities / states… the URL that you choose at the start should be broad enough to cover those and not too narrow to exclude them. If you have traction w/ your SEO and are ranked well w/ that URL you won’t want to bail on it. Also… you can still make it work with the name of the city in it if the other areas you plan on investing in are around the city in your URL.
In the end… it just has to make sense. If you have a URL that is “webuyrhodeislandhomes.com” and you’re marketing in Oregon… that doesn’t make much sense. But if you have a URL that is “webuydallashomes.com” you can totally make it work by creating city specific pages for each suburb of Dallas. That works great.
do you have a how to video, to add more cities or states?
Hey! Thanks for the comment.
No video per se but here’s our tutorial on the process for Carrot clients here:
https://help.oncarrot.com/tutorial/how-to-add-multiple-cities-to-a-carrot-site/
Dive into that then hit up our support if you have any other questions. We’re here for ya!
– Trevor
Trevor, I was trying to figure out how to add the cities and found the short training video. I was able to add about 10 cities in no time. Thank you for the clear instructions.
I would like to know if there’s a way to add my own form from a different site?
Hey Deborah! Awesome! Glad you were able to get those location pages launched easily!
YEP! If you have a form from another system that you want to put on Carrot.. you can add it as long as that other system gives you a form embed code.
The best thing probably is to reach out to our support team and let them know what system that form is from and we can help you from there.
Also, we integrate with lots of other platforms so you may be able to use our integrations vs. having to put the form code on the site.
Either way we’ve likely got you covered :-)
Now I find this after being recommended seperate sites (I had 3 in the plan) before I signed up. This would be great, I have already done most of the work for all 3 sites for 3 markets. Ugh!
Ok I get it this works best for just one lead type,wont work for me darn it.
Great White Board Session Trevor!! I’m all over it! Time to takeover Maryland Land Investing c/o Investor Carrot!! -Andre
Sweet! Take it over man! Go get it!
Do you recommend using this strategy for the Carrot Land Investing site? Just watched the video session again and towards the end, you mentioned you do not recommend using this strategy to target both buyers and sellers, which is the way the land site is setup. Please advise.
Hey Andre!
Great question man.
So… this video I mainly focused on motivated house sellers and I should have clarified what to do for other types of prospects.
Motivated house sellers are a tad different when it comes to the wholesaling / flipping model because most of the general population isn’t educated on how investing works or how the wholesaling model works… so ideally you want to heavily focus your message on how you can help that particular prospect… and not one click away also be selling houses at a steep discount because to the person who doesn’t have experience w/ the investment model… they’ll immediately see “well they are selling properties at a steep discount, therefore they’re likely going to lowball me”. Keeping the message focused works great.
As a real estate agent, most agents have pages for both buyers and sellers because usually a person who sells their house w/ an agent also will use that same agent to buy a house… and people understand the traditional sales process, how an agent makes their profit, etc… so that doeesn’t throw them off.
For land, notes, and things like that where the person selling that asset is likely an investor… that prospect knows and expects you to offer less than full face value and understands you’re likely going to re-sell it. And many times someone who wants to sell a note may want to buy another note later. Etc.
So ya for land, having both the buy and sell side on the same site isn’t a big deal at all. But we have several Carrot clients having lots of success with having separate buy and sell sites for land. To me it really depends on how you want to market your brand.
But yep, if you have your buy and sell side for land on the same site… just make sure when you’re doing your marketing your driving people to the specific page on the site w/ the messaging and call to action best suited for their situation.
i.e. – if your home page is mainly focused on attracting a land seller, drive your land sellers from your direct mail, craigslist ads, FB ads… wherever… to your home page.
Then you’d have a page on your site setup specifically to speak to buyers of land… and your land buyer marketing should link directly to that page. Like… yoursitehere.com/buy-land as an example.
Don’t over complicate it… and hit us up if you want us to take a look at things :-)
If I was going to wholesale in 10 different cities, would I need 10 separate squeeze pages, or 10 separate landing / permalink pages? How many 2nd tier location specific pages can I build on your platform with a subscription? Thanks :-)
Steve!
Great question man.
With Carrot you can build as many location specific landing pages as you want. So there’s no limit there.
But yes, ideally each market you want to go after and rank well in SEO for… ideally each market has a page specific to that area.
Make the home page focused on your broad market (or your primary market) on the home page and then location specific landing pages for the other markets that you link to from your home page.
If you’re a Carrot client we can help you do this in our Carrot Marketplace of services.
Go get ’em Steve!
Thanks Trevor for the quick response. That sounds great about unlimited landing pages. So if I understand correctly, if I had individual ‘we buy houses for cash’ type domains for Boise, Missoula and Spokane I could point them at the city landing subpages and advertise them on my direct mail as individual websites? Thanks!!
Always educational wtching / listening to Trevor and the crew.
Much Appreciated
Hi Trevor, I can feel your compassion to help us and you are appreciated. Im in Florida, and I am wanting to wholesale from Central Florida to North Florida with way too many cities in between. What do you suggest? I know targeting the big cities like Orlando, etc. is good but what about the people in the smaller cities that are thinking about selling? There are so many of them, how do I include them all? Am I going to have to list them on my home page?