Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents
Realtors can have a Google Business Profile of their own. What goes in each field, how to get verified, and how to ask for reviews without breaking Google's rules.
Google lists real estate agents among individual practitioners, so your profile goes under your own name, apart from your brokerage’s, as long as you deal with clients directly and can be reached at its address during the hours it shows.
Three fields decide whether the profile stands: the name, the address and the category. The first two follow from the way you work:
- At your brokerage’s office, where other agents also meet clients: your name only, at the office’s address.
- As the only agent at an office under a brand: one profile shared with the brand, named Brand: Your Name, at the office’s address.
- From home, meeting clients at their homes and at showings: your name, with the address hidden and up to 20 towns or ZIP codes as the area you serve.
The category is Real estate agent in each case. The brokerage’s own profile for its office, under the brokerage’s name, takes Real estate agency.
The setup is an hour’s work, and verifying adds days: a postcard has to come by mail, and Google’s review after any method takes up to five business days, rarely longer. Where the profile then shows in the map depends on how far it is from the person searching and on its reviews, and the reviews are the part that takes months.
Before you create anything
Search Google Maps for your name, your phone number and any team name you have used. Profiles get created from other sources, so one may already exist. If it is unverified, open it and choose Claim this business. If a past brokerage or a marketer verified it, request ownership from the profile instead of making a second one: Google allows one profile per business, and two would split your reviews between them. Old directory listings that still show a previous brokerage or phone number are worth fixing too, and local citations for real estate agents says which to fix first.
Sign in with a Google account you will keep for years. It can use any email address, your own domain’s included, and it should be the profile’s primary owner rather than your brokerage’s account or a marketer’s. An owner can remove other users and delete the profile; a manager can do everything else. Give anyone who helps you, an assistant or an agency, manager access. Google tells agencies to hand ownership to the business the day it asks.
The name
Use the name on your business cards, your signs and your website, and nothing more. Google allows a practitioner’s title or degree. Adding anything else, your town, “homes for sale”, “best realtor”, a phone number or a slogan, isn’t permitted and can get the profile suspended.
The brokerage’s name stays off your profile when other agents meet clients at the same office, because Google gives the brokerage its own profile there. Only a sole agent under a brand puts the brand first, in Google’s own format.
The category
Google asks for the fewest categories that describe what the business is, rather than everything it offers, so add a second only for another business you actually run. It also reads what kind of business you are from your website and from mentions of you elsewhere, which is one more reason the site the profile links to should say “real estate agent” and the towns you work.
The address or the service area
Show an address only where clients can meet you during your hours: your brokerage’s office, with its sign up, if you work from there. If you work from home and meet clients at their homes and at showings, remove the address and choose a service area instead, up to 20 cities or ZIP codes within about two hours’ drive of where you’re based. Google requires that of a business that goes to its customers.
The towns tell searchers where you work. They don’t put you in each town’s map: Google ranks the map partly on the distance from the business to the person searching, and your business is where it’s based, whatever towns you list.
Some setups never qualify: a virtual office, a mailbox or P.O. box, a co-working desk without your own sign and staff, and a listing or a model home, although a sales office can have a profile. Neither does a lead-generation brand, such as a home-search site under a made-up name.
Phone, website and hours
Give the phone number that reaches you directly, since Google asks for one the business itself controls. Link your own website’s homepage, never your Zillow or Facebook profile: Google bars links that send people to pages other than the business’s own, and names pages on social media among them. Tag the link so its visits show separately in your analytics, for example https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp.
Set the hours you answer the phone and meet clients. A practitioner’s profile rests on being reachable at its location during them.
The description and photos
The description says what you do, where, and with which brokerage. Google allows no links in it, and no prices or promotions. Add a headshot, your office and the neighborhoods you sell in, in photos you took or have the rights to: photos are on Google’s short list of what improves local ranking, beside verifying the profile, keeping its information complete and replying to reviews. Posts are optional, and not on that list.
Verification
Google chooses which verification methods your profile is offered, and you can’t change them. Where a video recording is one of them, Google recommends it. A live video call with Google’s support is another: you need to be at the location during its hours and show on camera where you are, with the building’s sign or a street sign; your business, with your marketing materials or a yard sign; and that you run it, with the keys to the office or a non-sensitive business document.
If you get a postcard instead, don’t change the name, address or category while it’s on its way, and enter its code within 30 days. Google then reviews the profile, which takes up to five business days and rarely longer, and sometimes verifies it at once when your website is already verified in Google Search Console.
After that, every edit is reviewed before it shows: usually within ten minutes, sometimes up to 30 days, and service areas within 48 hours. Changing the address or the name can bring a request to verify again, so settle both before you start.
Reviews
Reviews are what move an agent up the map: Google counts how many a business has and its rating toward the prominence it ranks on. In the profile, take your review link and its QR code, and send the link to every client on the day they close:
Thanks again for letting me help with your move. If you have a minute, an honest Google review helps the next buyer or seller decide: [your review link]
Clients need a Google account to post, and any email address can open one. Ask every client, not only the happy ones, give nothing in return for a review, and don’t tell anyone what to write, a neighborhood or a team member’s name included; Google removes reviews gathered any other way. How many reviews the agents in your map already have, and how to catch up with past clients without a burst Google distrusts, is in local SEO for real estate agents.
Reply to each review in a line or two, and keep the transaction out of the reply: no price, no address, nothing a client told you in confidence.
What the profile brings
Once it’s verified, the profile’s Performance report lists the searches people found you with, updated at the start of each month, and counts the calls, website clicks and direction requests it brought, Google Ads included if you run them. While those searches are mostly your own name, the profile is serving people who already know you; it’s working when “realtor”, “real estate agent” and your town climb the list.
The map reaches only so far from where you’re based. The towns beyond it are won by a page for each on your own site, with its listings and what you know about the place, and that is the work we do as a realtor SEO company, with the profile set up beside it.