Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents: How to Get Free Leads & Rank #1

If I were to ask you the question, how much business are you getting from social proof and essentially your digital footprint and there's no work involved to get these really warm prospects.

The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share, share it all with you the good, bad and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results.

You just gotta do the work. Your Google business profile, it is one of the most under utilized tools in a real estate agent's business. That's why we're here every week, to build businesses that serve us, not enslave us. And the quick backstory here is this was back in probably 2017, I basically realized that we were focusing on, at that time we didn't spend a lot of money on Zillow, but our only social proof. So social proof is basically people going online and saying nice things about you. And when people search for a real estate agent or an attorney or a dentist or whatever, they're going to find your Google business profile and they're going to see those good things and the social proof, others saying how awesome you are are the reason they're going to reach out to you. So this was back in 2017, 2018, when I realized that I visited my dentist and when I checked out for my dentist, so I was just sitting down to like pay for. And this was a cleaning is my first time at this dentist. And it was a unique experience. It was one of those businesses where you go in and there's a different level of client care involved. They kind of gave me a tour of the whole office and all the different sort of stations if I ever needed this or that or their whitening station and the whatever, right? And you know, so I was checking out and the, the girl that was checking me out asked me a question. She said, she picked up her phone and she said, hey, have you ever left, have you left us a five star Google review? And I'm like, well, you know, I haven't, you know, it's my first time here. But essentially I said no. And she said, okay, if you don't mind, if you had a great experience today, go ahead and pull up a browser. And she, you know, Watched me pull up a browser. So you pull up your Google Chrome here and you know, go ahead and search in. And I did it. Valentine Dentistry. And she said, okay, click on that. And I clicked on it and she's like, okay, click on reviews.

And.

And then she's like, okay, did you have a five star experience? She's like, go ahead and click on five stars. And she said, would you mind saying some kind words about us? And I said some kind words. And off we went. And I was like, man, that was awesome. I asked her a question, I said, you know, why do you think the owners are having you do that? And she said the owner shared with us that some of their traditional marketing isn't working. They spent a lot of. I was actually on the radio with these guys so I knew that, that and we didn't go big on radio, but I knew that it was not the return that it was when I, when I once did it. She said, the owner said that it's not returning the way that it used to. And I said, do they give you like a bonus? You know, do you have any compensation attached to getting? She's like yeah, they give me a bonus for everyone that I get. And I'm like that's awesome. So I immediately like a good business owner. Does they go back immediately disrupt the entire business as it's like, as everyone's doing everything and it's like almost like hey guys, we are starting this one thing today. Going forward at the time I think we had 50 Google reviews and they were just by happenstance, there was no process in place that business, I exited that business, sold it in 2020 but now they have over 2600 five star Google reviews and get business regularly just from that one activity. So if you have none and you don't even have a Google business profile, we're going to go through all that process today. But you cannot ignore your social proof, your online digital footprint in terms of what people are seeing about you online. This has to be an intentional effort. You're actively approaching this side of your business. One other quick story. So we've got members. This is part of our core implementation and if you ever need help on the implementation implementation side of anything I talk about on these free trainings, we do that in million dollar agent method.com so go to million dollar agent method.com and seven minute video booking. The strategy session. We can talk about if you're a good fit for that implementation journey. It's only 90 days. It's not this never ending there's no paid leads, there's no referral fees. That closing, none of that garbage. We help you build out inbound organic lead generation and conversion systems. And so Google Business Profile is, if you don't have one, the first thing. So there's five things I'm going to go through here. So if you're taking notes, these are five things. The first is you need to claim your profile and verify your business. And if you need some help on that, obviously we can help you through that. But you can also just go to Google or go to YouTube and say, hey, how do I set up my Google business profile? And it'll show you. Make sure it's a recent video. So you're looking at the most recent interface, but then you're going to claim and verify your business. Little bit of hurdle there, right? Because I think they send you a physical postcard to your business address. And so a little bit of effort there. That's the first thing you need to actually set up your Google Business Profile. It's worth it because you'll generate business. Okay, I realized I didn't tell the story I was just about to tell. We've got one of our community members, did 52 transactions last year. Two things she did to generate business. She has a database in a Google sheet, a Google spreadsheet, 250 people. She did 42 transactions from that one. Basically just has coffee and lunch and invites them to free community events. No cost, hardly super low cost, but generates 42 transactions. So over three transactions a month. The other side of her business, 10 to 12 transactions, is from her Google business Profile doing exactly what I'm going to show you right now. And there's really nothing more to it. Most agents do not go to the level of effort and detail that we're going to go through right now. So the first thing you need to do is claim your profile, verify your business. The second thing is you need to complete your profile. It would blow your mind. Agents that have claimed their profile and verified their business, when I go on there, they haven't put the zip codes that they service. So any business can go in and get a Google business profile, obviously. But you need to put in the zip codes that you service, the hours that you work, and a really strong business description. And your contact info needs to be consistent across all platforms. So if you have a YouTube profile, if you have a Facebook business page, if you have an Instagram business account, whatever platforms you're using, the pictures should be the profile. Pictures should be the Same the, the phone number, the email address and the physical address. Really important. Google and YouTube. YouTube is part of Google. It's all search, right? So everything you do on your Google business profile, they're going to favor it because you're using their native stuff. That's kind of the backdrop of all of this. You want to play the game Google wants you to play, do stuff on their stuff, right? That's why if you do a search on Google of anything, it comes up with a bunch of videos and they're YouTube videos. It's not coming up with Vimeo videos or Wistia videos or some other video search engine. I don't even know. I mean I know those two exist, but it's not showing those results, it's showing YouTube videos, right? Because YouTube's a part of Google and I place my chips, all of them on Google over a Zillow. Like a lot of agents focus on Zillow. It is not where you want to build your social proof. Trust me on that one. Just trust me on that one. So that's number two, complete information on your business profile. Three, and this is where again most agents miss the mark is that you need to post regularly. You need to treat your Google business profile as any other and you may not be doing anything else on online. Just to give you a backdrop of million dollar agent method, the two fundamental lead generation systems we teach, and they're not overly sexy, but they work for multiple transactions per month is database touch blueprint. Adding value to your database like legit authoritative expert level value to your database. So they think of you and refer you Brand Authority Builder, which is basically using social media platforms to post engaging content where you're building authority, you need to put that same content. So if you're not doing that, you've got a problem. We can help. But whatever you're doing on Facebook or Instagram, you're putting that same content on your Google Business profile. So high quality photos of properties. If you're hosting open house, make sure those are on there. Your weekly or bi weekly market updates, you should be doing those. Those are part of our touch system. Any content you want to include in your Google Business profile, it's right on your phone, in the Google Maps, on the business bottom right part of that screen. So essentially it just becomes another, another app for you. You can add photos, put your hours in, you can add events there, open houses, put a cover photo on, change your cover photo, all that stuff there, right? So you want to do all of those things, all right. Number four, and I would say arguably the most important is that you must get Google reviews. So there are a variety of different ways to get this. You should challenge yourself. The big challenge is that you want to get to twice as many as your nearest competitors. So when you search best real estate agent in your zip code or your city, a hundred agents come up. Just some of them are sponsored. So they're sponsoring, they're doing Google local service ads. Don't do that yet. Don't spend any money yet. You can do that once you're optimized and you have a ton of reviews and then it works really, really well. But do not mess with that right now. It's a separate, separate training we'll go through. So big picture, you're going to want to get twice as many as the nearest competitor. So if you go on there and there's one agent that has 175 reviews, your goal is to get to 350. The initial goal, like as soon as possible from this moment forward, you got to get to a hundred. Whatever it takes, you got to get to 100 on your way to twice as many as your nearest. I remember when we first started this, we had a, We've got some really big teams in our market and one of them was like 800 reviews. And we're like, we're never gonna get to, you know, surpass that agent. But now we're, we are more than twice our nearest competitor. And like I said, I say our, but I've exited that business. But you definitely get two extra competitor. These are the gold. Right? You'd be blown away once you do this right? And you, and you, you do the things I'm telling you to do. People are going online and they're searching, they are searching for real estate agents and they're looking like the same way that I found, I found my eye doctor by going on. I just searched best eye doctor in 28277, which is a sort of a popular place where a lot of doctors and businesses are. And it's close to where I live. I live in a different county but like four miles away. And I just went to the one that had the most reviews and actually went to their website and booked an initial consultation within like three minutes of doing that search. Right. So are you like set up that way online where people can even book in for a consultation from your Google business profile? Right. And that kind of brings us to number five, enable messaging and Q and A and also the ability to book in a consultation with you Right. Could be something as simple as just getting calendly and having a link which you can publish a link there, just say book a consultation and then just have you know, two calendars. Buyer consultation, listing consultation. I mean you could really be really basic but you don't want to leave any of this to chance. Messaging is the ability from your Google business profile buyer and seller prospects or people responding to your content can message with you directly through the platform and then Q and A. You basically can list out a bunch of questions and answers. And we have one of our listing tools is the top 10 questions to ask a listing agent that you're considering hiring to sell your home to actively market homes, you know, what are their success rates. So again if you come into our world and you don't have any sort of marketing collateral for pre list packets or you know, buyer packets or listing presentations, all of this stuff is swipeable, editable in canva. Question number one, will you let me unconditionally cancel my listing agreement if you aren't doing your job? Answer is yes. It's our easy exit listing agreement. Question number two, can you show me your actual results compared to other agents? Yes we can. And we've got four things. We sell more homes, we sell them faster, we sell them for more money. We sell, it's more likely to sell. Question three, what do you do to generate interest online for my home and what are your actual results? We go through it. Question 4 what do you do to get buyers to take action and call for more information on a listing that you have for sale? We have our yard marketing system. Question 5 Do you have a database of your active buyers you can show me if so you know and then we show them our buyers in waiting and I know I just went through those but it's actually like a an actual document that we pre as part of our pre list packet. We give it to them ahead of time and it's 10 questions that we know the answers are with their like we answer them in the document. So it's really really powerful tool increased your not only your ability to secure a listing but to get it at the right price with the commission you desire. So little things like that. But I am way off track. My point is that you want to build in Q and A messaging features into your Google business profile. So this is one of those things that you know the initial push to get to 100 reviews, fill out you know, claim your profile, verify your business, complete all the information, post regularly, treat it like another platform, get Reviews, hundred right away, 2X, your closest competitor and then enable messaging and list a bunch of Q and A in there as well. And then the goal is to never stop getting reviews. Like this is just going to be a part of like, even at closing, it's like husband and wife, they're both going to give a review. Like, hey, you have a Gmail account. You have a Gmail account. Great. Pull out your phones, let's go ahead and do this all together. Wait, your 12 year old over there in the corner, you know, watching YouTube. You got a Gmail account. Come on, we're going to do this as a family. I want all of you guys to do exactly the exercise that I did. I want you to go on your browser search up, you know, Lars, real estate expert. Go ahead and click on there, go ahead and click on there. Say some kind words that are accurate. You know, was it a five star experience? Great. If it wasn't, let's talk about it. And then off we go. And then you get three reviews. Right? It's not rocket science, but it's got to be a part of your closing checklist. We also do Google review contests. You know, the good thing about Google reviews is that you don't have to. The person legit has to know you. Like, I wouldn't ever ask someone to give me a review that doesn't know me. But they don't have to have. They don't have to have. It's not necessary that they bought or sold through you. Like, if you know, you have a colleague from a prior job that knows you're in real estate, they can say, you know, yeah, Nancy is like super professional, always thoughtful of everyone's needs, wouldn't hesitate to recommend her as your agent whether you're buying or selling. But they could know you from the office where you were super thoughtful because you brought in donuts every Friday and you were super professional because you had a horrible boss and you always kept your composure. So that's kind of the beauty of the platform is that, you know, you could probably get five times the amount of reviews. People that haven't worked with you directly but will legit say good things about you. If you network with other agents across the country that actually know you or you mastermind you're in coaching programs, they can say kind things about you. So there's so many good ways that you could ramp up your Google business profile and your social proof, which is kind of the overarching strategy here, is that you need to have social proof. People saying good things about you. And the hub of all that is your Google business profile. Okay, I've gone a little bit longer than I expected, but so much love, so much respect. We, we are fighting a fight in our industry where there are too many agents that are average that don't put in the level of work that you guys are willing to put in and there aren't enough home selling right now. So we're still in a unit recession and showing up and doing the work. I give you so much credit for that. So much love, so much respect. If you know you need implementation help, like you know that you've been at this game for a while or you know, maybe you're coming into real estate with a good background, but you don't know how to build out these core Legion and conversion systems. All inbound, all organic, no cold calling, no pay leads. Just go to milliondollaragentmethod.com watch that 7 minute video. If it resonates to you, within 90 days we're going to build out all the systems you need to close an additional two to three deals per month. And that's no bs, right? I've been doing this for a long time. Thousands of agents have come through real estate B school. We are 12 years in at this point, right? So this is not new stuff to us and we've evolved over time and we're just constantly bettering our systems and our processes and getting rid of what's not working as well and installing stuff in agents businesses that are working really, really well, including all the brand authority builders, social media stuff, the stuff that actually gets you business. So we'll see you guys over there. Like I said, much love and respect.