The Truth About Ranking in Google Local Search

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Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey, hey listeners, boys and girls, Jeff Simfer, your humble host of the mortgage marketing radio podcast, thanks for showing up. I appreciate you spending some time with me, however frequent or infrequent you do. If you're new listener, let me know. Jump into our private Facebook group. If you've been around and you've been liking the content and you want more, or you've got a question, you want to ask me anything, go to our private Facebook group. You go to Facebook, you type in mortgage marketing radio and you should see the private group come up for the podcast. We got a couple questions to ask you to make sure you are indeed the mortgage and real estate space as a practitioner. We'd love to have you come join the group. So that's what you do. More access to me to us to what we're doing and jump in quick because I'm going to be going live through the rest of the second half of December, sharing a lot of great content, special guests and stuff. So make sure you join us in the private Facebook group, I'd love to see you there. Okay, so this episode, we are talking about Google and specifically your Google business profile. Google has, once again, changed the name from Google my business to Google business profile. Yes, isn't that dramatically amazing? So there's a lot of misinformation when it comes to marketing, digital marketing, right? Social media. And Google is one of those areas, particularly the Google business profile and what helps you rank and show up in local search, there's a lot of misinformation out there. And of course, the Google business profile is one of the classes that we allow our members, our mortgage professionals to teach to real estate agents virtually and in person in our pro membership. By the way, if you want to learn more about that, go to mortgage marketing.pro. But anyway, it gives our mortgage professionals a platform to get in front of real estate agents, add value by simply sharing the information we've put together in a very shareable, repeatable form for them. So that's what that's for. And one of the classes, as I said, is Google used to be called Google my business. Now it's called how to show up in local search, the new Google business profile. And because there's a lot of misinformation out there about Google, for example, I wanted to, I'm a big like, I want to find out the truth, right? My title here, self acclaimed title is Chief Truth Teller at the mortgage marketing radio. And I love to bring the truth, not hearsay, not hype, not urban legends, but actual data backed truth. And so that's the genesis behind today's episode. My special guest, Joy Hawkins, is a Google business, I would dare I say subject matter expert. She is an agency owner, and she's been working in the local SEO industry since 2006. She is a Google top contributor, right? And she spends a lot of time managing Google ad accounts, and she certified in both Google search and display. And they do a lot of testing at her agency to discover the truth versus the rumor. And I've been reading her blog, we're going to put a link in the show notes to all her information, which is sterlingsky.ca. And then she's also got a training site that's in the show, the show notes links there as well, localu.org, that's local, the letter u.org. So check that out as well if you want to get more of your own self education on this. But I wanted to have her here to kind of unpack some of the missed rumors, misinformation about ranking in Google and what actually effects or impacts your ranking in the local Google business search, you know, your Google business profile that shows up on the right hand side that should have your picture. It's got reviews, it's got a map link and stuff like that. So I think you, like I, might be surprised by some of the truth when it comes to what impacts your ability to show up in local search and the one thing that actually impacts it the most. What is it? You're going to have to stay tuned and listen to what she shares. Okay. So let's get into this great conversation. I'd love to know your feedback on this and if you want to go deeper on Google, jump into our Facebook group, let's have a conversation there. Without any further hesitation, let's get into this week's show. Hey, Joy, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You bet. Thanks for being here. And why don't we do this just for the listeners? Quick setup. Who is Joy Hawkins? What is she all about? What do you do? Yeah. Well, I own a local SEO agency. We are in Canada and the U.S., so we have employees in both countries and we serve small businesses of all various types, lots of real estate agents, lawyers, insurance agents, things like that. And I've been working in the industry since 2006. Awesome. Thank you so much. So as you know, I shared with you right before we hit record is I wanted to kind of have a, you know, level the field, set the stage conversation about Google business profile. But I thought it makes sense just to make sure we're all on the same page. If you could in the simplest way, you know how to explain what is a Google business profile and why should it be relevant for our audience? Yeah. So it's basically Google's platform for any small business where your customers are local to you. So if you are like, for example, a plumber where you go out to your customers, but you only travel to a certain area, obviously, it's only feasible to drive so far. You would be considered in that field. And then also if you own like a brick and mortar, like I think of a pizza shop or a bank or, you know, real estate office, anything that's got an actual physical address, this listing is essentially what shows up when people search for your business name on Google. And it usually, you know, it's got a map pin. So it's few people can get driving directions, usually as reviews and photos and lots of other things. Okay. Great. Thank you. Just for those that are listening and we're unsure. And it's interesting. Some people have a Google business profile and they don't know it. I'm sure you've seen that, right? So why is that? How does that happen? Yeah. So I mean, if Google only relied on people to submit their own information, they would have a very small inaccurate database. So they get information about businesses from a variety of sources and a lot of times we'll create listings for businesses that don't have them. And they also like users submit businesses too. So like, you know, if I noticed a new piece of joy in my town and they don't have a clue what Google is or like they're not checking it, they haven't submitted a profile yet. I can actually create a listing for them. Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Because I find oftentimes when I'm working with some people, they're like, I don't even know if I have one, you know, and we'll type their name in and that will come up, right? With nothing totally void and empty, which isn't doing them any favors. How important though, knowing our audience is mortgage and real estate, how important is having a fully optimized and set up Google business profile today? Yeah. It's huge. I mean, on one hand, it's a way that you can get leads. So, you know, people searching for real estate agents near you, you're not going to show up there if you don't have a listing. So that's one thing. And then I would say the other one is just branding. So like, you know, if somebody's researching you trying to figure out like, should I work with this person? Are they reputable? It's a place where you can have some control over what they see and kind of just make sure that you're actually paying attention to who's reviewing you and, you know, are you responding or you monitoring that? There's just so many different applications for it. Okay. So, on your blog page, and we're going to put links to your website and all that kind of stuff in the show notes for those who hear stuff and they want to continue reading. I mean, let me start here is, where do you see the most common errors of people when to come to their Google business profile? Well, for real estate specifically, the biggest thing that we see is real estate agents will set up listings all using the office address. And this is a huge problem. So we do a lot of audits for realtories in FIFA and like, you know, 40, 50 or more agents all registered using their office address. Sounds like I know in some states, they even have like rules around this. So, you know, in some cases, there's not much you can do there. We always advise agents to use their home address mainly because Google allows you to hide it so you don't have to like have your home address publicly listed on Google. But their Google's algorithm, the thing that determines who ranks for what, they filter out listings that are similar. So if you've got 50 agents, I'll use in the same address. Somebody searching you that address for real estate agents is going to get one, maybe two of those agents and the rest all get filtered. So it's interesting you say using your home address, naturally, some people block at that. And I know you just mentioned, so is that something new they added to allow you to hide your address? No, it's been an option for a long time. I think just originally when people thought of that, they thought of the plumber. You know, they thought of the guy that works out of his home doesn't have an office. But like, it applies to so many other industries, real estate definitely being one of them because most realtors, they do work out of an office, but they also work out other home. And like my agency's listing, for example, is set up using my home address because we are all remote. We don't have an office. So there's a lot of business types that it applies to. And your address does not show on your profile? Not at all. And that doesn't affect search ranking. It does. So like, for example, let's say you are a real estate agent in Chicago, but you don't live in Chicago. You live in Naperville. And so you set up your listed using Naperville. You won't rank in Chicago. So that's kind of the downside. You will rank in Naperville. It is based on where the address is. It's just that address is something only Google can see. So the average user searching on Google won't be able to see your home address or get driving directions or anything like that. And when you choose to hide your address, it's clearly it's not showing up on your profile in when you search. But is there any negative to that? Because I think a lot of people are used to kind of seeing an address. Any concerns there? Yeah, I mean, not really. You won't have a driving direction button. You won't have a map pin. There's a couple like little aesthetic things that are different. But overall, like the reason why we recommend it is just because it is so hard to compete. We had a real estate agent I was working with that had I think a thousand reviews. He was the number two real estate agent in the particular country he was in. And he wasn't showing up because of this reason. There was like 90 something real estate agents using the same address. He was one of them. So like he was doing all these things. He's this massive agent, huge team. And this was his problem. So it's it's really a problem that I don't suggest fighting. Yeah, and I know I recently went through a setup with somebody and that is when you're setting up your profile, I believe there's a call to action to hide your address on that form. Yeah, for sure. You can also clear it off if you already have a listing setup and it's got your address on it. You can clear it and hide it. So that's doable as well. Interesting. Okay. Great. Good info. I'm glad we cleared that up because I got that question a lot. Let's then all right. Let's just go down the list in terms of like your usual best recommendations for real estate or mortgage professionals in terms of profile optimization. Yeah. So categories isn't a huge thing. There's like I think three major categories that we see apply to real estate specifically. So there is a real estate agent category. There's a real estate agency category. They're pretty similar. And then there's another one for commercial real estate. I don't remember how many there are for mortgage brokers, but I think there's couple. Yeah. There's just a couple. And it's like mortgage broker, I think. So it's not nearly as complicated as other industries we work in. So that's good. As far as your name, though, it's like catalyst, your name. That's something we see done wrong a lot. So we usually suggest listing the brokerage name. I was actually talking to someone about this yesterday and they didn't list their brokerage name. And I said, you know, there's a lot of people. Let's say you work for Keller Williams. A lot of people search for Keller Williams or Keller Williams agent. And I don't know who these people are. I just see that they're search volume. But one thought is that agents get commissioned if they refer at a state, you know, sales to other agents that work for the same company. So I know that's true for my mother-in-law who works for or she didn't work for Keller Williams. If I was to buy a house, I'd know her and I used to Keller Williams agent that she referred to me, she would get commissioned. So people search on Google for like, oh, you know, give me a Keller Williams agent in the city. So it's a lot of mis traffic, I guess a lot of agents don't think about that. And then also just making sure that you list like your name. You can use the word realtor depending like as long as it's prominently used on your logo and your website and stuff. If you're able to come up with a name for your brokerage, like if you haven't gotten to that point yet, where you're trying to think of like what your team's name is, including something that has the word real estate in it is a really good idea. All right. So to be clear, so in your when you're setting up your name, I heard you correctly, including the brokerage name is helpful and important, but also including the word real estate in there because that's a searchable thing. Yeah. So let's say, for example, I'm setting up a listing for myself and I work for Keller Williams. I would want to be like, Joy Hawkins, Toronto real estate team. Let's say that's the name of the team. And then, you know, Keller Williams agent, the name of the team, I know like various, some people can control that and some people can't, but if you're like just coming up with one, you know, having the word real estate in there is a good idea. Well, I'm looking at one right now. It says Gillian bachelor, simply Vegas, simply Vegas is the brokerage, but what would you add to that? Gillian bachelor real estate realtor real estate is it preferable to be one of the categories from Google? Yeah. So like, if you can change the end, this is where it gets kind of tricky because Google doesn't want you keyword stuffing. So they'll say like, you're not just allowed to go ad words, but if it's part of your name, you're allowed to add it, right? So we've had some conversations with clients where we're like, you know, can we add this to your logo? Can we get it added into your website? Like can it be kind of get morphed into your business name? Like is that, you know, as long as there's no rules, because I know some states have rules on this. I just want to be really clear. I'm not advising to break any of those rules, but yeah, as long as you can get it kind of reflected in your name, your real, your real world name is Google would say, you're not breaking any of Google's guidelines, and it definitely has a ranking benefit. Awesome. All right. So let's then move to keywords. This can be confusing for people. How could they use keywords with their profile? Yeah. So I mean, you're not, again, supposed to put it in your business name unless it's part of your business name. So that's why I was kind of suggesting like incorporating into your team name, if you can. So you're not supposed to put it there, really where you're optimizing for keywords is your website. So your Google business profile is ranked based mainly on your website, like traditional SEO, all of that stuff applies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's not something to just gloss over. No. Roll back. Say it again. Okay. So like a lot of people think when they fill in this profile, the stuff that they're putting in is what makes them rank. In reality, there's only a few fields that even have any impact on where you rank at all. So one is your title, like I already mentioned, your business name. One is your categories, which I already mentioned. Reviews definitely play into it. I don't know if they're a direct ranking factor, but if you have a lot more reviews than other agents in your town, you are naturally going to have more people click on you, and that will help you ranking. But the more reviews doesn't necessarily rank you higher. Oh, no, not at all. Like I said, that thousand review guy, like he, I think is, yeah, his closest competitor didn't even have half the amount of reviews he had. So it is not a race to see who has the most reviews. Okay. But it is social proof, kind of like you said. Sure. Yeah. If you're a rank, then that's a huge factor of like who's going to click on you. So yeah, and click through rate is a ranking factor. So like the more people like interact with you, the more popular you are, it is a popularity contest. So when it comes to Google, so that is, that is important. So by click through rank, you talking specifically website? No, just like clicks on your listing clicks, but I mean, I would suggest they're clicking on your website or clicking to call you. I'm going to, I'm going to like control us back because I definitely want to ask you about the content, the images and stuff on like, is that a click through example? Yeah, images don't have a huge impact on your click through rate because they're not really visible. Like, in order for somebody to see your images, they have to first click through to your profile. And then, you know, I'd say for some industries, images are super important. Like if you are a restaurant, like images are everything. Real estate, not really, you know, they're not like browsing for houses on your Google business profile. So it's not the same concept. So I'd say like for photos, you'd want to have, you know, a photo of your team, a photo of your office, that type of thing. But like, I see some agents like uploading photos of the houses they sell and that's a lot to manage, like upload and then remove them as you sell them. You definitely don't need to be doing that. Well, there's been people saying, right, I mean, you got to upload lots of images and stuff and like Google wants frequency of content. Yeah. Yeah. Not for Google, my business, I'm sorry, Google business profile. So for your website, I mean, like, of course, you want your website to have your, your recent listings and stuff on there. Like, that's a no brainer. But there's no like listing feature on your profile. Your profile is about you, your business, not what you're selling. Well, I've read stuff that says, you know, take pictures of your office outside. If people are coming by, they'll be able to identify it, right? Yeah. Absolutely. But that's like, that's a one time thing, right? It's not something you have to do. Like what drives me nuts is like these people that, um, have, it's a lot. I see in Facebook groups and stuff, they're like, oh, add three photos a week. And I'm like, what the heck are you adding photos of? Like, what is there to add? Yeah, it's not Zillow. Right. Well, it's, it's not like, again, you're not a restaurant. Like your menu is not changing. Like it's, I don't know. That's a, that's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up. But I don't want to, I want to come back to the website. Uh, if I could correctly, you said one of the biggest factors to your, your search ranking is your website. That's good. To your profile. So I unpacked that a little bit. Yeah. So I mean, a lot of people think that they're like these two separate things. And we even sometimes look at people and reach out to us and they're like, we want you to work on our, um, you know, map pack rankings or a local pack rankings, but we've already got a SEO company. And I'm like, those are not two different things. Like, that's the same thing. So I'm like, if your SEO company doesn't know anything about Google's profiles and how they work, you need a new SEO company because you are a local business. You need a, uh, SEO company that knows both, um, there is no separation like how we influence where our clients rank when we are working on them. The majority of what we're doing is stuff on their website, oh, I'm a link building, um, and that's how you move the needle. So I know there's some importance, though, in terms of when it says website on your profile, I was reading earlier something about the page itself, the landing page, where it goes, it's set. But in terms of what drives though, why so much weight on website link? Like what if my website sucks, does Google look at traffic on the website or anything or what? I mean, if your website sucks, then you're just not going to likely rank very well. Like, I mean, we see, we do see people with a really old websites that, they do rank well, but like their website still has content on it. It's still readable. It's just it's ugly. That's a big question. It's Google looking for frequency of content over there or traffic or how's it determining? Oh, it's a good quality website. Yeah, frequency of content is definitely not a thing. Um, so frequency doesn't really matter. I mean, you want to keep, when we do audits, we tell I did one couple days ago for real estate agent and I, they have amazing content and I'm like, we need to keep this updated because, you know, if you're talking about like best homes to buy and Dallas in 2021 or best neighborhoods, we want to make sure we update that to 2022 and like we go in and make sure like the statistics are relevant and stuff. That's not because like we're trying to please Google per se, we're just trying to keep it accurate so that users are actually finding what they're supposed to find, which will eventually, you know, help with with rankings because people aren't going to bounce back to the search results. Um, so that's important. I'm not saying like, you know, frequency thing to like just put content out there and never update it, but how you know what to update should all be based around what pages are actually getting you, uh, people look to your site and what are those people converting? Are they calling you? Are they filling, um, out of registration form or registering for your site? Um, that's how you should determine what to update. Don't just like, you know, throw stuff at the wall and hope sticks. Yeah, that's why I was curious like with with the link to the website should it be the homepage versus a CMA page, like you said, a form to fill out, is that like a lead capture thing? You know, I gave what you're saying is like, are you already getting activity on one page? But I also think, doesn't it kind of make sense it to, to, to, to, from a direct response standpoint, kind of utilize or leverage that activity rather than just go to my homepage, which a lot of people's home pages are terrible. There's nothing. There's no opt in. There's no nothing, right? Don't we want to try and capture some people you think or what? Yeah. So, first of all, you should definitely have that opted on your homepage if you don't. So that, that'll solve that problem. But I'd say for most cases, we would suggest linking to the homepage, because it is the strongest ranking page of your entire site, um, most sites, like if you've got a real estate agent, for example, it's got five offices, then usually no, we don't recommend linking all five to your own page. We look to see what, what page is Google ranking for that town and those queries? And if it's not your homepage, which it usually isn't, then we link to that page instead. Interesting. Very interesting stuff. This is both art and science. Yes, definitely. All right. That's good info there. Let me keep going down the list here. Check my questions. We talked about business category, URL link, which is the website link. We talked about frequency updates. We're, let me talk about this one, which I love, because I think you debunked this. If I correct, you did some testing regarding geotagging images, and I was, I was somewhere, oh, I was going to teach this class in some agent who couldn't attend the class. She winds up like messaging me, and she's like, first of all, it's not called Google My Business anymore. Oh, okay. Thank you. But then secondly, it's like, oh, you know, you have to geotech your images in this and this and this and this. All right. So let's debunk this. Geotech, first of all, explain what it is, and then let's debunk that. Yeah. So geotech's are these lat long coordinates that get added to photos. It's a field, like kid in behind the scenes, you wouldn't even see it. But Google definitely read them. You know, lots of other devices can read them. Sometimes when you take a picture with your phone these days, they're automatically added. It depends on your privacy settings. So like I could be taking a photo in my backyard and have the settings turned on. It's adding the coordinates of my backyard to that photo. So there are like practical uses for them, but you know, people have over the years claims that they help you ranking because it helps Google see where you're located. It sounds good in theory, right? Like it does actually make sense and there's a lot of things that I've heard in this industry that make sense that are not true. So the Google side, like for your profile, the reason why it was kind of ridiculous for that, it's like Google already knows where this business is located. They literally have it pinned on a map. Like you don't need to help Google understand where you are. They really know the exact address of your business. So you don't have to help them. But then I thought maybe your website, because they don't necessarily have an exact address matched to your website per se, the way that they do for your listing. But we tested adding geotagged photos to a bunch of different verticals, different industries, to the sites, to the page that we were linking their Google profile to didn't see any impact in ranking either in the organic section or the local pack section. So yeah, like I know, we tested a bunch of them on no impact across the board. And that's a lot of work. As a matter of fact, if I read correctly, doesn't when you upload the photos, Google strips out the packing anyways, right? So does, so do a lot of content management systems, depending on your website platform you're using, a lot of them delete geotags too, like they can't support them. So like Slack, which we use for instant messaging, they delete geotags. If you send a photo through Slack, the person downloading the photo at the other end doesn't have the geotags on the photo anymore. Wow. So yeah, it's just a lot of work for absolutely no impact. All right, so how precious I'm trying to come with the right word, you know, the Google 3 pack, right? That's like, oh, like the perception at least for me is like, that's the Holy Grail, the Google 3 pack. So is that or not, you know, when it comes to being selected, first you got to get to show up and search to even be chosen. But then any data on Google 3 pack versus, you know, the profile on the right side there in terms of clicking. Yeah, so I love working actually in the real estate industry because you really can't just take one approach because there's a lot of searches that don't trigger a 3 pack. So what we generally find is things like homes for sale, there's no 3 pack, there's no local listings showing up there. There's all organic, whereas like real estate agent or realtor or like Keller Williams agent or things like that, those return local pack results. So you kind of got to think of like your strategy, really need to target both, but like focus more on organic stuff for like the homes for sale terms. They don't convert as well, but they get more traffic. So it's like you really want it all, but usually we prioritize the real estate agent terms because those are the highest converting. Let me pivot for a second. What about reviews I've heard, if tell me if this is true or not or something like when somebody's leaving you with a review, you know, oh, make sure they put your name in it or whatever because that helps as well with search, tell me about that. We're doing a test on this right now. It's not done. So I don't want to like misspeak, but we will be publishing, we will be publishing that because that is another thing I've heard a lot and I'm very skeptical about. I'm also skeptical that you can actually control it, like we've tried, and it's like you can't really tell your customers what to type. It's crazy. Yes. Yeah. So it's this. Yeah. Just cut and paste, right? Yeah. No, it's, yeah. But we stay tuned. I will definitely be releasing something next year once we got the data on that because we've been doing some testing around review is quite a few. Yeah. And of course, that seems to be where everybody's drawn to is reviews, right? And I tend to, you know, probably promote that heavily too in terms of the importance. Like when I'm working with real estate agents, they're either going to have, well, not enough reviews because five is not enough for this one particular agent. I know who's already sold 156 homes this year, right? But her reviews are heavily on Zillow. So I assume that does Google also scrape Zillow for any ranking, yeah? Usually it comes up like when you search for the agent by name, they have what's called a knowledge panel. So it's a fancy word that we use for like the, basically the profile, the Google business profile. But when you're the only one that shows up, so if somebody searches your name, it's not likely going to get a three pack of like three listings, you're going to get just your listing. And then you see way more details on it. All right. I'm going to do it right now. I'm going to do a screen share. I'll show you. There you go. I've been talking about. So this is a knowledge profile over here? No, the right. So where it says five Google reviews, that whole thing, like it's boxed in, that is a knowledge panel. This is a knowledge panel, also called your profile. Yep. Yeah. It's the profile like the listing, but like the knowledge panels when it like shows up to the right like this, and you'll see like down there, if you scroll down there, it's like reviews from the web, kind of interesting, actually that they're not pulling in Zillow there because they usually do, but it says Facebook and like that's usually where you will see other reviews show up. Interesting. They don't show up in your review accounts, like where it's five reviews on Google, that's strictly your Google reviews, up at the top, but like the reviews from the web section, that can get populated by third party sites. Exactly. I've seen that and that's usually pushed further down. And what I'm curious about is, you know, in terms of the, usually it's on mobile anyways for most people, right, when they're doing this, like those to me, those reviews that get pushed down from third party sites, I don't know like the percentage of people that actually see that. Yeah. I mean, the one great thing about Zillow is like you look to the left there, they get the gold star ratings. So like that gold star feature is really powerful. So we usually tell people to focus on review sites that get those, like not all review sites have those. So if you're advising somebody on how to divvy up their reviews, usually I tell them this to give the customer, you know, no more than three choices, and I'm leaning more towards like for real estate anyways, and mortgage is Google and Zillow if you have a presence on Zillow. Yeah. I mean, you got to prioritize like what you get leads from, right? So if you get a lot of leads from Zillow, then obviously you don't want to leave it alone and not get reviews there. So, you know, I kind of base it around that, but Google's always number one on the list. It's hard to top them. What do you mean by that? As far as like priority, like where you'd want to get the most reviews, we see generally that like bang for your buck, you'll get more putting more reviews towards Google than any other site. Yeah. And of course, as I'm sure you know, there's this whole dynamic with Zillow and real estate agents, right? Some people want to have Zillow die and pull away from them. Yes. But let's just face it, Yelp is no longer relevant for all of the state, right? Yelp is, man, so Yelp is tricky because you're not supposed to solicit reviews there. So if they catch you and out of all the reviews sites there, they're the most likely to catch you. Like Google does not monitor stuff. Yelp is really picky and they actually have a policy against it. So if they catch you soliciting reviews, they can actually negatively like impact your profile. If they're not available, they take the reviews down. They have a penalty, like a ranking penalty, they can issue on you. If they think you're doing something manipulative, like it's crazy, the lengths they'll go to, they almost go to too far on an extreme. So yeah, Yelp, there's not a lot you can do to influence them unless you're like literally, you know, manually asking people like, hey, do you use Yelp? Oh, if you do great, can you leave us a review and like, okay, I wouldn't even put it in an email. Like any, any way that Yelp can track clicks and stuff, I wouldn't touch because they can see that. Yeah. They have ways of telling. Too much friction. It's crazy. Yeah. Is there any advantage to a real estate agent, have an independent agent, not a brokerage, having multiple reading your article here, multiple practitioner listings, well, there's really only two or three to choose from as a real estate. Is that real estate? Yeah. So I would do it if like you have an office that doesn't have a million realtors in it, for example, because those do exist. So let's say you have an office and then you also live like in another city, you know, if you have two profiles, then essentially you can rank in both cities, which is great. And it's perfectly legit because like I said, real estate agents do work from their homes, like they're not violating any guidelines there. And I also ask Google that it was perfectly fine. So we originally thought it wasn't, but yeah. What is it? You know, a mortgage professional and you're licensed in multiple states and you're actually generating business across those states. Should you have multiple profiles? Absolutely, but it's tricky because it's like, well, what address do you use, right? If you don't have an office, so I mean, like get an office if you can, like even a small one, but like, I realize it's not feasible. So people often go the route of getting like virtual offices or co-working spaces and those get flagged very, very easily. So yeah, they're not, you're not supposed to have a listing at like a location that you're never at. Yeah. So I mean, if you want a house, like I see people do this, they get creative. But like you are like, oh, I'm licensed in these three states and you want a house in the other state, you could use that address and like home address and hide it. Any quick advice for people, I know you see this a lot. I have an old account and Google won't let me switch the info or whatever, right? Stuff like that. Yeah, they've actually streamlined this process really well. So I actually have a video I did that's in Google's help center. So it's like, for a way, you have to Google to get to it. It's something like somebody else verified by listing the actual YouTube video that I did showing you how to get access to it, but they streamlined it. So you just have to request access and basically the person doesn't respond, whoever has access to it, they'll let you re-verify it within I think three to seven days. Oh, okay. Great. Yeah. So they have made that better because it used to be better. Way better. Yeah. All right. So why did Google do this really? This change from the name for the fourth time. I mean, so I've been working this space for a really long time. This is nothing new. They do this every like five years or so. I mean, like it went from Google Places to Google Plus profile to Google My Business. I think I'm missing a few. I think before Google Places, it was Google Maps. Yeah. Like, they do this all the time. So I don't know. I think their people internally just get bored. No idea. Yeah. But they do. They do a lot. Well, it keeps their job, right? Right. Let's rebrand. This is better. And they're doing away with the Google My Business app for small businesses. And I've already used the whole in browser, you know, ability to manage your business. I have to say it is a little bit simpler in that I don't have to log in to that third party app and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know. It's just creative. Good news for us. It creates some attention for people who like help people with this info. So it brings attention to you, right? It brings it back on the radar that I really need to fix that thing. Any last just, you know, you're in a room full of real estate and mortgage professionals. Like you've got, you know, three minutes to give them their last, your last bits of advice on securing business leads from their, their Google business profile. What would you tell them? We do a really good amount with PR. So like, I mean, this part is, you know, time consuming. So you need to have somebody in your office that could help you with this. So I'm going to have time to do it yourself. But just there's a lot of like local reporters and like people that are writing that have the need to interview people or like get thoughts from professionals. And there are so many around real estate, like stuff like homes of like neighborhoods, you know, things like that. There's just a lot of pieces about it. So we do really well with getting links to our real estate agent clients from like those types of outlets. It's a lot more of an interesting topic compared to some of the other industries we work with. All right, it's Friday. I was outplayed last night. Help me understand what are we, how are we tying in PR and interviews to our Google business profile? Because links matter. So links are one of the biggest things to help you rank on Google. So the more people that link to your website, the better. And this is something that most people don't do. So they don't think about links at all. You talk about links or? Yeah. Hmm. Really? So back to the interview thing you're talking about. Like if I had a PR press or I was featured or links in general, the more links I have on my website will improve. And these are the way links to some other destination, not my property. People linking to you. So just the opposite. Okay, sorry. Right. Yeah. So we use like, there's a service that they're called Haro, for example, it's called, it's H-A-R-O, help a reporter out. And it's reporters that are like literally asking, you know, I need a, I need an expert in this area to interview for this thing or whatever. So that's one way monitoring queries in there. They can connect with reporters and stuff. Again, it's edge work. I'm not, it's not one of those things where it's like going to take no time at all. But it's definitely worth it. What about if you had preferred vendors or providers that would connect to your site like movers, plumbers, you know what I mean? Contents, scapers and all those. 100%. So like that's usually the first thing we asked people like, I did an audit for this real estate agent and her husband was a mortgage broker and they weren't even linking to each other. It's like, you know, you should probably have like a, hey, you need a mortgage broker on your website, linking to your husband and vice versa. And then usually real estate agents don't even link to themselves because they have like six websites and I'm like, okay, if this is your core website, why are your other websites not linking to your main one? Like you're literally losing links. And that's just a page you can add on your website that says something like, you know, partners, preferred, preferred vendors or whatever, right? I mean, I, we don't usually suggest doing it like that because it's easier for Google to kind of pick up on. Like throughout your content, as it makes sense, like, you know, when you're talking about mortgages, you can link to, you know, the March broker if you're talking about, so you're talking about options like writing about these topics as an article. Most people already have the content. Like when we get these, honestly, we do for real estate agents a lot of them already have like fully fleshed out blogs and articles and things, but they're not doing, they're not doing anything with links. It's kind of huge missed opportunity. Yeah. No, I remember that's a weakness on my own website as well. Hacker links. All right. This has all been good stuff. I so, so much appreciate your time. For those that are listening and they want to connect with you, find out more, you've got a great blog, lots of info. Where do you want to direct them? Yeah. SterlingSky.ca. That's my agency, the .ca's because I am Canadian. But we, we have offices in the US and Canada. And then if you want to learn more about local search, we do conferences three times a year right now. They're all virtual. I'm going to talk about localU.org and it's you like the letter U. LocalU.org. Okay. Got it. I'll make sure that's in the show notes as well. Joy, thank you so much for your time. I've learned a heck of a lot. I'm going to keep reading and following you. So thanks for sharing with our listeners. And listeners, you know what to do. If you like this episode, hey, leave us a review. And thanks for tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey, guys, what's up? Real quick. You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before and you just want to quickly remind you if that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. Let's just face it, agents are still a solid pillar of business and sources of purchase business for you. Well, good news. 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