Optimize Your Google Business Profile

BY DARRELL WEEKES

In our super-competitive world of mortgage services, standing out for the right reasons & getting an edge over your competition is crucial to your success.

One of the best ways to get an edge is to build a strong online professional persona – and the single best way to do that is to leverage a well-optimized Google Business Profile (GBP).

Your professional persona is your online identity & reputation. It encompasses your expertise, reliability & approachability. A Google Business Profile allows you to craft & showcase this persona effectively. Your GBP page is not only a powerful tool that enhances your online visibility, but it also helps you generate leads & attract new referral partners. This one strategy can be a game-changer for you.

Today, 87 percent of people who are referred to you will Google you as their first step because, these days, your GBP is treated by most people as your “quasi home page,” as it is a far more trustworthy source of information about you & your business practices than your website ever could be. I’ve never read a bad testimonial on a website, but I have sure read plenty of bad reviews on GBP pages.

Your GBP not only provides information about your business hours, contact details, products & the services you offer, it includes client reviews. These are critical in crafting a powerful professional persona. You see, each review is independently verifiable social proof that you are an awesome mortgage professional, or alternatively, a lousy mortgage professional. This is why your GBP plays such a significant part in how your online professional persona is perceived and is a significant contributing factor when it comes to generating new business opportunities.

There are basically two ways to leveraging your GBP, and hardly anyone utilizes the second.

First, there are the organic search results. This is when someone searches for a product or service on Google because they don’t know who to talk to. This is where your keywords & optimization play a critical part.

While we have seen clients generate up to 40 leads a week with a really well-optimized GBP, it takes time for Google to index your page, and is a longer term strategy, so you need to be patient. Having said that, there are some specific things you can do to accelerate your indexing & I’ll write about what they are in an upcoming article.

The second way to leverage your Google Business Profile is through deliberate searches, where someone specifically searches for you or your business because they are researching you. This is where your GBP can really pay off big.

By encouraging prospects, clients & potential referrers to Google you, they will find your GBP and click on it. Each time they do, two things happen. First your GBP will index higher in the organic search results, because the Google algorithm recognizes people are searching for you and starts to make you more findable, and two, you are allowing them to discover for themselves just how awesome you are by having them see your 5 Star reviews.

Having people come to their own conclusions about how awesome they think you are as a mortgage professional is so important.

You see, unchanging principals of human psychology dictate, that once we make up our mind about something by coming to our own conclusion, it is very diffcult for us to then change our mind back.

This is why leading our prospects & potential referrers to discover for themselves how good we are is so much more effective than just telling them how good we are. This is why crafting the online professional persona you want is so important, because the power of perception cannot be underestimated.

The bottom line is, if you don’t tell Google what to say about you, Google might tell the world things you don’t like, and one of the best ways to tell Google what to say about you is to have your reviews say what you want them to say. Ask the people who agree to give you a review to include certain keywords.

If you’d like to see how impactful that can be, just Google “mortgage broker near me.” Click on one of the GBP results that has reviews, you will see three of them next to the map, then click reviews. When you do, you will see the words most often mentioned in the reviews at the top. What is the most mentioned word? Is it team, or something like that?

If it has nothing to do with mortgages, or home loans, then that’s an opportunity for you to out-SEO & out-market them.

Darrell Weekes is a marketing strategist, reputation coach & founder of Purple Thread Marketing, which works with mortgage & RE professionals in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK & the USA. In the early 90s he helped establish two of Australia’s most recognizable mortgage brands, Aussie Home Loans & the Professional Lenders Association Network, before founding ProMortgage, his own award-winning business in 1999 – where he personally closed, on average, 420 loans a year. purplethread.com.au