Lead gen: Google Business Profile done right

When someone hears your name at a dinner party, they search it. What Google shows them — a complete profile with fresh reviews, or a bare listing with a wrong number — is your first impression at the exact moment of highest intent. The profile is free, and most agents in your market maintain it badly. That’s the opportunity.

Step 1: claim and complete, properly

Claim the profile, verify it, and fill every field like it’s an intake form for your best client. Category: real estate agent. Phone: the one you answer. Website: your site’s homepage — not a portal profile, not a social account. Name, brokerage, and service area exactly as you advertise them everywhere else. The full field-by-field reasoning lives at Google Business Profile for realtors; the principle is that an incomplete profile reads as an inactive agent.

Step 2: load the visual proof

Add real photos — you, your signage, homes you’ve represented (your own imagery, not lifted listing photos). Profiles with genuine visual activity get more clicks and more calls; stock-photo emptiness gets scrolled past. Refresh a few times a year so the profile never looks abandoned.

Step 3: build the review engine

Reviews are the ranking factor you can influence most and the trust factor clients weigh most, so systematize the ask:

1. Trigger. Every closing gets a review request at key handover — put it in your closing checklist so it can’t be forgotten.
2. Mechanism. Send the direct review link by text while the moment is warm. Two taps, not a scavenger hunt.
3. Reply to everything. Thank every reviewer by name; answer any critical review calmly and factually. Prospects read the replies as closely as the reviews.

A steady cadence built into your process beats an annual begging campaign — and your referral engine runs on the same happy-client moments, so pair the asks.

One more surface worth owning: the profile’s question-and-answer section. Seed it yourself with the questions prospects genuinely ask — areas served, how you work with first-time buyers — and answer any new ones fast, because on an unattended profile, strangers answer them for you.

Step 4: keep it alive and count what it sends

Once a month: confirm hours and contact details, post an update if something real happened (a launch, a market note), and check the profile’s stats — calls, direction requests, site clicks. That last number is the one to track over time, and if you want the local-SEO context around it, the GBP service page covers how the profile fits a wider local strategy alongside the social channel.

What done looks like

Verified profile, every field accurate, real photos, a review ask wired into your closing routine, all reviews replied to, and a monthly glance at what the profile sent you.

The mistake that costs the most

Set-up-and-abandon. A profile claimed in January and untouched by June — old number, no new reviews, unanswered questions — actively costs you the name searches you earned everywhere else. Fifteen minutes a month keeps the asset compounding; zero minutes turns it into evidence against you.