Ep. 307: Google Business Pages for Real Estate Agents in 2022

Google Business Page Setup

What You Need to Know

Who should listen: Everyone who wants to optimize the potential of their Google Business Page to rank high and attract prospects.

Key idea: Google is clearly targeting local businesses, so now is the time for local business owners to maximize their investment and use all the tools Google is offering.

Action item: Set up your Google Business Page.

This week’s Stay Paid guest is Jason Pantana. Jason is among Tom Ferry’s most in-demand business and real estate coaches. He’s also an expert when it comes to optimizing Google Business Pages for local businesses, and he shares how to create a Google Business Page, why you want one, and what affects the ranking of any particular Business Page.

This information alone is worth listening to his interview, except Jason shares so much more!

He also talks about creating a killer Google Post (which is essentially a profile of your business), why he believes in geotagging images, what you need to do to become a Google Screened or Google Guaranteed business, and why Google Local Services Ads are the best ads you can be running now.

But Google has been around since 1998. Why all the fuss about it now?

We’re glad you asked . . .

It’s because Google has gone local.

Google’s strategy now includes favoring local businesses and services, which makes perfect sense when you consider 2 key pieces of information:

• The percentage of Google searches that include local intent is significant.*
• Google’s primary objective is to provide the best answer to a search query.

You can see Google’s strategy and the emphasis it’s placing on local businesses and services in the way it presents its search results. For example, let’s say you used Google to search pizza.

Directly below any paid advertising will appear the results of what Google’s algorithm assumes you are looking for—good pizza close to your location. Those results are collectively called the Google Local Pack (some also call it the Google snack pack, the Google map pack, and the Google 3-pack.) It features the top 3 answers in the main section of the screen and includes a map showing where each pizza shop is located.

To the right of the main section is an area called the Google Knowledge Graph or, alternatively, the Google knowledge panel. This is where you’ll find Google’s next best guesses for what you want when you search pizza—just the facts.

These locations are the holy grail of the search engine results page (SERP)—they’re where every local business wants to appear—and, during his interview, Jason reveals his secrets for how to get your business to show up.

When you realize that searches for “local” and “business(es)” have grown 80% year over year on Google, you’ll understand why we say this is an episode you’ll want to make time to listen to with paper and pen.

Please enjoy this episode, and we’d appreciate it if you would give us a 5-star rating and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. (Not sure how to leave a review? Click here.)

Connect | Resources

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*Since at least 2016, bloggers have been reporting that 46% of all Google searches express “local intent,” which is a fancy way of saying people are looking for businesses and services close to where they are at the time of their search. The origin of this statistic is suspect. The best description I could find was a secondhand report of a Twitter forum discussion that attributed the statistic to a “Google rep official presentation” shown during the Secrets of Local Search conference at Google headquarters.