Bobby "The Google Guy" Kerr: The Future of Search

So, as a holistic view, we know that Google Business Profile, on a weighted scale, is the number one source of how these AI tools are pulling data. So that's about 45% of the weighted data is Google Business Profile. Number two is your review strength — not only on Google, but everywhere. And we're going to talk a lot about reviews in a second. Number three, most important, is the recency of all of the activity that you have on Google, on your website, and on those other citations. And lastly, website strength. A lot of people think website strength is at the top, right, because it really was for about 20 years, but things have completely changed.

What I want everyone to think about is like if you got a job interview — like, what comes first, the job interview or presenting your resume in person at the job interview? It's the job interview. So our Google Business Profile today is the job interview, and then your website is the resume. And so that's kind of why it's inverted now. Google Business Profile is the most important, and the website is kind of down at the bottom. We know GBP, as we call it, is still king. But how do we help our Google Business Profile?

This isn't just a Google Business Profile presentation, but it's such an important key to AI visibility that I want everyone to know how to make your business profile better. And there's lots of tools on the business profile that we can use. We can post to it just like if it was a Facebook or Instagram profile. We can add, of course, we get reviews — get them consistently. We can add products. We can add services. By doing all of these things and using all of the Google tools, Google will start to reward our business by showing us in search results. But Google alone, as we know, is not enough. Okay? We can't just be there. We've got to be other places.

But since Google is the most important, I want to talk about Google reviews, because some people think — and Larry, you might be able to attest to it — you've done really good, you've amassed a lot of reviews, but not all reviews are created equal. Okay? So we're going to talk a little bit about why it's so important to start coaching our clients on the types of things that they add to their reviews when they're leaving us a five-star review. So, number one, fresh reviews are way more valuable than old reviews. So if you've got a profile with 100 Google five-star reviews, but you haven't had a recent review in three months, Google is actually — and I don't mean this like hyperbolic — Google is starting to look at your business as if it's dying. It's anemic in their eyes. So recency on your profile, especially with reviews, is such a massive ranking factor. And so we've got to be super consistent.

I'll talk more about it in a minute, but here's an example of what a great review looks like. Okay, "Felicia is a local pro. Clear communication throughout the process and care in every detail. I was nervous about being in and out of state selling my property in Grain Valley, Missouri, but Felicia made it painless. Only use Felicia Davis if you want the best sale price, recommendations on schools, parks, things to do in the Grain Valley area. Felicia will take care of you when buying or selling a home." Okay. Now, wouldn't we all want a review like that as opposed to just five stars? Absolutely we would. So we've got to start asking our clients to be detailed.

Okay? And I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to make a five-star review the most valuable in just a second. But you can see, right — they mention her name. They mention a geographical location. They mention real estate specific terms. They say that she's the best, or the local pro, right? There's only one thing missing from this that would make it like perfect, and I'm going to say that on the next slide. But we can get these kinds of reviews on Google, which is the most important. But also those other citations — we can get reviews on those too. And in fact, when we get reviews on multiple platforms, Google and the AI tools start to value us as better business owners. They have more trust in us. In fact, Google actually calls it trust signals. So when we have this type of material and content on our profiles, they literally trust us more and will recommend us in more search results.

So we see some of these citations on the left. Of course, the big ones — Facebook, Google, Zillow, Bing, Yelp, Realtor.com, Better Business Bureau. I told you about FastExpert and HomeLight. And these other two you might be laughing to yourself. You're looking at them and you're saying, "Isn't that the Yellow Pages logo and the MapQuest logo? Like, Bobby, this is 2026, not 1997." Right? Here's the thing. Think about how long Yellow Pages and MapQuest was a business and how long ago it was. Who do you think has amassed the largest database of business information — address, names, phone numbers — over the last 30 years? It's those companies. So they may not be forward-facing now and we don't use them on a daily basis, but they are stores of data. And so having your business data on their platforms is very important, because they are very, very valued on the back end. So like when some of these platforms that power like Uber drivers and Google Maps, Apple Maps — they're actually powered by data that's been provided by Yellow Pages and MapQuest. So all of us can go on there and create profiles. But here's the kicker — they're not free. They know how valuable it is to create a Yellow Pages citation now, and so they charge us every month. Same thing with MapQuest.

So if you have the discretionary marketing income to get these type of citations for your business, it's worth it, because Google and AI search tools are pulling data from these places all the time. I bet maybe one person in this group might have known that MapQuest and Yellow Pages is happening today in 2026. So hopefully that's really, really valuable to you guys.

Larry MF White: Hey Bobby, any idea what's the monthly fee for Yellow Pages and MapQuest?

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: I think it's like 15 bucks a month. Last time I checked, I think it's pretty close to that. 10 or 15 bucks a month. Which — all the time I get people that text me like, "Yellow Pages wants money," or "MapQuest wants $15 a month." And it's — yeah. They know their value, right? So we all know our value and we can charge for it.

Larry MF White: Yeah.

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: So, we talked about fresh reviews, right? And this is a perfect example. I want everyone to aim for three to five new reviews every single month. And some of you might be asking, "Well, Bobby, like I'm not" — you might be saying — I think it was Bea Shust. Bea said this morning that she's got like 27 closings in the last 24 hours. Like phenomenal, right? Well, she can get three to five reviews pretty quick for this month. Maybe not all of us have three to five closings every single month. So, in that case, you can still get three to five reviews. I like to call them character reviews. So ask people within your sphere, your past database, or just maybe co-oping agents, like, "Hey, you know, Larry, you know how professional I am. You know how ethical I am, and you know I know my stuff when it comes to real estate. Would you mind leaving me a Google five-star character review to tell the rest of the world how awesome I am?" There's nothing wrong with that. So for those of us that don't have three to five closings a month or more than that, ask for a character review from somebody who knows how you do business.

These AI tools, they're prioritizing freshness. Okay? So one review you got last week is more valuable than 10 reviews you got three years ago. Okay? So, look — don't get me wrong. And realtors more than anybody else — and all I do is work with real estate agents on this stuff, but I know every other industry — like, realtors are the worst at getting complacent when it comes to getting reviews. And I know I'm generalizing because it is most of them. Realtors get to like 50 or 100 reviews and they're like, "All right, I made it. I'm looking good now. I got social proof." But here's the thing. Google doesn't care about what you've done in the past. They want to know what are you doing lately. So recency is a huge ranking factor.

So, here is the holy grail of a Google five-star review. All right. Number one — and take a picture of this, remember it, memorize it, build your campaigns around it. Number one, somebody leaving you an actual five-star rating. Okay, that's layer one. But here's the thing. If they just do that, Google starts to look at your profile as maybe spam or fraudulent, because anybody could leave you a five-star review. How does Google know that that's a real client or a real human being? We need some other semantic factors to play here. So that's what the rest of these things are.

So number one, a five-star rating. Number two, they mention you in the review by name. Okay, that's the second most powerful thing that they can do in their review. Number three, mentioning the geographical location where you served them. I'm talking city, state, neighborhood, subdivision, street name. Okay, if they do all of that, it's phenomenal. If they only do a few of that, it's still really, really, really good. Okay, and why? You might be asking, like, "Bobby, that sounds ridiculous. Why am I going to ask somebody to mention their street name or their subdivision on a review?" It's because everything driving Google Business Profile and all these other AI search tools is Google Maps.

Google Maps is the umbrella parent of Google Business Profile. So we've got to tell Google Business Profile, which is telling Google Maps, which is then telling all the other AI tools, that we are the best in our geographical location. So everything needs to be hyper-hyper-local content. Everything we're putting on our website, everything we're putting on our Google Business Profile, every review we get has got to be so hyper-local that Google starts to think, "Why would I recommend anybody else in this neighborhood, in this city, in this town, because this person is obviously the expert?"

Okay. Number four layer is some hot keywords that talk about your significance. So saying things like you're the local pro, you're the best agent, you're the local expert in Dallas, Texas, wherever it is that you are. Okay? So we've got to have some of those keywords. And lastly, if you're the type of rockstar agent that actually still goes to closings with your clients, have them leave that review when they're the happiest — have them leave that review sitting at the closing table, and take a picture, a selfie with you when they're there, and add it to the review. If you get this to happen on the majority of your reviews, Google is going to start to pick up and say like, "Holy cow, like look at what Kim Walker's doing over here. She's now with EXP. She's kicking butt, and look at all these reviews, and she's got pictures with her clients. There's no way this is spam. We want to start recommending her and her team because of how powerful and how recent her reviews are." I hope this is helpful, guys. This is how you win on Google and how you win on AI search in 2026. This is it. I promise you, your competitors are not doing this.

Larry MF White: I was gonna say, a couple of questions coming through here. What do you do when your business is all over the place? Kelly Jones wants to know.

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: What does that mean, all over the place?

Larry MF White: Well, like — go ahead, Kelly.

Kelly: Well, like — we're, Jeff — we're pretty big REO brokers. So we are over three counties. Okay. I'd love to be hyper-local. I'm not. Right. So how do you become hyper-local in your community when your business is all over the place?

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: Yeah, it's a great question. So I live in Southwest Florida, but I have spent the majority of my life in Kansas City, Missouri. And Kansas City is Kansas City, Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri — like, huge metro, a million people within 30 minutes of each other. So there's a couple ways to skin this cat. Number one, the easiest way is to have multiple Google Business Profiles, okay? But Google gets pretty stringent upon that, and they'll suspend maybe some of them or all of them if they think it's a duplicate. So you actually literally would have to have like physical locations sometimes to do that trick. Not knowing, you know, state real estate laws about offices and buildings — a lot of agents use a house. Like, if they've got a significant team leader and they say, "Okay, your house is going to be our address on Google," you could have that house be one of those Google Business Profile addresses. You could have your main office be this one, and then maybe a Service Area Business is the other one. So you don't list an address, you only list some cities and counties that you serve. So there's some ways to kind of hack that.

But the other way, Kelly — like, if you don't want to risk that, you just have one, but then you basically — Google Business Profile has Google services built into the back end of your profile, and you want all of those services to be custom services that start to target very, very specific neighborhoods, cities, counties. And that's how Google starts to listen to your profile, is through having AEO-enriched services, products, posts, photos on your Google profile. I hope that makes sense.

Larry MF White: Cool. Larry, anything else on reviews?

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: Uh, yeah. And then Kim actually asked, "What happens when you lose a Google review mysteriously? What's going on with that?"

Great question. Unfortunately, this is very common. It has happened to me five or six times over the last five years. It's just now part of — like, I know it's going to happen, so I account for it. It's very unfortunate. One time one of my businesses lost 50 reviews overnight. That's soul-sucking. It sucks. Yes. So there's a couple of different things. It's — no human being is doing that. There's no human at Google that's going through and removing them. Google obviously is all built on AI. It is scrubbing every one of the millions and millions of Google Business Profiles in real time all the time. And it seems like — and they do this in chunks. So it just happened like three or four weeks ago, maybe even two weeks ago, where I started getting calls like, "Hey, I lost 17 reviews. I lost five reviews," from all the business profiles that we help manage. And I lost some too.

There is a way to try to recover them. So what I always recommend is that you keep — and it's an archaic way of doing it — you keep a spreadsheet of every time you get a Google review. You put in a spreadsheet: Kelly Jones left me a five-star review. These are the words she left me on this date. And you do that every time you get a Google review. So you've always got this backup, because there is a secret link that some of us have that you can send a message to Google support that says, "Hey, I am missing reviews." And then the first question they're going to ask you is, "Who are you missing reviews from?" And if you say, "I don't know, I'm just missing reviews," they're not going to reinstate any of them. So yes, it happens. It happens overnight a lot of times, and it is mysterious. And the only way to do this is to literally file an appeal to Google support, and you're going to have to say these are the people they're missing from, so they can cross-reference it with the back end of their system.

Larry MF White: And just a personal question that I have here. So if you're asking for a review — like, it makes sense to me that I like, if I'm reaching out, I'm like, "Bobby, I would love a five-star review from you. If you're feeling inclined to do this, could you mention my name, where we did business," right, "maybe some keywords of the thing." Like guys, just list this stuff out. If you know what Google is looking for, ask for these things specifically. They're already writing a review. It's going to take them two more seconds to think about it a little bit more. Would you agree, Bobby, or any percent — that that's what we do?

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: So, like if I'm helping Michael Gable and I've optimized his Google profile and now he wants me to like help him on a monthly basis or something, or even if it's just once, and he hires me and he's like, "Bobby, I need to up my reviews. Can you help me with a review campaign?" That's the exact verbiage that we say. And usually — and everyone write this down, like this is my personal secret sauce, but it's not rocket science — when a real estate agent goes back to their clients and they say the words "I need your help."

"Can you help me? I'm on a mission to get to 50 Google five-star reviews in the next 60 days. Can you help me?" Your past clients are going to bend over backwards, because you helped them so much, and this is like the first time you've ever asked anything of them. So that verbiage tends to be — that's like sales psychology stuff. When you literally say the words, "Can you help me?" it's very difficult for someone to ignore you. So 100% coach them a little bit. Don't tell them what to say exactly, but just say, "Hey, it helps me tremendously if you say my name, your city and state or neighborhood — you know that I'm the local expert." And if you got a picture of us, even better. So 100%.

Larry MF White: So I think that answers Jeff's question. He was like, "Can you just write it for them and have them cut and paste it?"

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: I wouldn't recommend that. To me it just feels icky, you know, like it doesn't pass my sniff test. I wouldn't do it myself. So I mean, you can do whatever you want, Jeff, but that might blur the lines a little bit.

Larry MF White: Nope. Kelly just vetoed it. I can hear their conversation already — like, "No, we're not doing that. Bobby said no." Yeah. And then Louise says, "If you have multiple locations or multiple business profiles, can you combine the reviews from all of them, or do they all have to be separate?"

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: No. I mean, if you've got multiple reviews or multiple platforms, it's kind of rare, to be honest, especially if you're in one city. If you're in multiple markets and you've got multiple business profiles, that's what you want. But the thing is, like, if you've got multiple out there, I wouldn't try to do anything with combining them, because you're going to have to let Google in on the "no" at some point, and they might just suspend all your profiles, because you're essentially breaking their rules and their policies by having multiple profiles when you shouldn't have. So if again, if it's multiple locations and multiple markets, you're doing great. That's what you want. But I wouldn't try to do anything with combining them. I have seen it happen once, but I've seen it go the opposite direction and be a bad result more than I've seen it be good.

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: So, I know we're kind of rushed. I've got — I'm going to rush through a couple more and I'm probably going to skip a few more. But I do want to talk really briefly about websites. Okay, if — like EXP, we're all using, you know, probably BoldTrail, or a lot of us are using BoldTrail for our websites. I just want to inform everybody a little bit. I got the guy behind the eight-ball, right. So, out of the box, BoldTrail websites suck. There's no way around it. They look good. They're meant to satisfy big shops like EXP. They're meant to satisfy brokers because they're super compliant. They're super sexy. They pull in MLS listings really, really well. Okay? But they suck at creating local authority and helping. I literally had a meeting with the VP of Inside Real Estate, who owns BoldTrail, on Wednesday, okay? They want me to speak at some of their events, and I had a meeting with him and I had this conversation and he goes, "Yeah, they're not meant to do that. They they're not going to help anybody rank. They know it, but they're not there to help you rank." So it's kind of on us to edit our own websites to create some local authority.

Okay? So, I'm going to move pretty quickly, but look at this first bullet. All of these BoldTrail realtor sites — they are essentially the same. There's 600,000 BoldTrail users. So, if everyone's on BoldTrail, it's essentially the same except for you — you might think that it's different because you got your name, your logo, your address, your phone number on it, but on the back end of those BoldTrail websites, they're all the same. There is no ranking data specific to you. There's no geographic data, unless you've gone in and edited yourself or had a professional do it. So there's basically 600,000 different mirrors that are looking at each other that Google's looking at. So it doesn't really help.

So here's the solution. Okay, you can add local content to your site. Everyone can go into BoldTrail and edit your website. You can add custom pages. You can add local pages — like, have 20 pages that are all about local cities or neighborhoods. All of a sudden, your website has a ton of local authority, right? Adding blogs — that's really easy to do in BoldTrail. You can add a blog, make it about a specific neighborhood, a new bar, a new restaurant that opens up in your town. Like, that's a great way to create this local authority. All right, so I just wanted to briefly let everyone know: if you think your website is doing all the work for you, it's just a placeholder for listings, and it's the second step in the process usually in today's day and age of how consumers are getting to you. So it is important. These are the ways to make it better.

Okay. So, local, local, local stuff. I'm going to take a TV time out here. Local. Speaking of, I just added this one this morning. Google Business Profile — you get to add photos, right? Think of it like a social media platform. You can add photos. And I will tell you, I don't have the stat, but profiles with over 100 photos on their profile get something like 1,000% more activity than people with fewer than 100 photos. Okay? And you can add videos as well. So if your profile right now has like your logo and your headshot, you better start adding some photos. But here's the type of photos that are being rewarded on Google profile today. Okay?

Number one. Here's what I do, and here's what I recommend to everybody else, especially if you're concentrating on a local market. Pick one day a month with you and your team and go out and take a bunch of selfies in front of local landmarks. Okay? And I'll explain why. Take pictures of you and your team in front of local sports stadiums, parks, schools — don't be creepy about it. Subdivision entrances, street signs, like famous street signs that are really famous in your town, water towers, restaurants, local businesses.

When you do this — okay, I highlighted this — maybe some of us have heard this term "geo-tagging." 10 years ago, it was kind of a fad where whenever you added photos, you could literally go in and change the data of your photos and add latitude and longitude coordinates. And everyone thought that that was sending signals to Google, like, "Oh, they're going to start showing my profile more in this town because all of my photos are geo-tagged." Well, that's pretty much been debunked now. The modern-day geo-tag, since everything is so AI-driven and Google's images and Google is so smart and other AI tools are just pulling from Google — the modern-day geo-tag that is working is you taking photographs in your local market with you in the photograph, while also having something branded in the photograph. Okay. So with me, any photos I'm taking, I've got a hat, I've got a t-shirt, or I've got a name badge on that says LOC8 My Business and Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency. If you don't have any of those things, no problem. Take a business card and take all of your pictures — and I know you're going to feel weird doing it, but hold your business card in your photograph. I promise you, it's going to value your Google Business Profile more than your competitors'.

Also — and I'm not getting into it on this workshop — but like, when you post and do anything on your Google Business Profile, don't make everything salesy or billboard. This is not Facebook in the year 2007. Okay? Google wants to know that you're a local expert. That doesn't just mean real estate. Okay? I'm going to say that for the people in the back again. Google doesn't want to know that you're a real estate-only expert. They want to know that you're a local expert on all things. So like when people hire us to build out badass Google Business Profiles, it's about not only, you know, real estate, but it's about commute times — because what are people thinking about when they move within a city? What's my new commute to work? What's my commute to get my kids to and from school from this city to this city? What are the local restaurants that I would recommend? So it's important to have this holistic view of what it takes to be visible online in 2026, especially with Google.

And it's not all about saying, "I'm the best. I had six closings today." If you just do that repeatedly, Google basically says, "Oh, this is getting worn out. All they know about is real estate. Therefore, they're not a local expert." So I know that's kind of a hard thing to wrap our heads around as real estate professionals, but that's what we've got to do to condition Google and the AI to start answering those AEO questions on our behalf. All right, so I'm going to keep moving here.

Also, anything that we're posting, guys — last slide here before we wrap it up — it needs to be seventh-grade reading level. Okay, that is what the AI wants. Seventh-grade reading level. Keep it all super simple. Not a bunch of industry jargon. I know it makes us feel cool because all real estate professionals have big egos. AI and other people don't care. Okay? It needs to be seventh-grade reading level. They're not looking for the most sophisticated. They're looking for the most helpful. So seventh-grade reading level, first person. Okay? This is new. For the last 10 years, everything's been third person — like, shove your first and last name on everything. It's changing now. It may be like the first sentence of your business description could be third person, but then they want everything else to be first person, because the AI — and now this is oxymoronic — the AI wants to know it's recommending a human business. So the AI is judging us on whether or not we are AI.

Okay? So we need to show that we're the local expert. So by saying "I" and "we" is going to be really important moving forward. Okay, so we know the weighted scale — Google Business Profile most important for AI visibility, reviews. We talked about all the important stuff in reviews, the recency of activity and accuracy of our citations, and then a little bit about our website strength.

Big takeaway — take a picture of this one, guys. This is like your search revolution action plan. All right. First and foremost, I call it locking in your GPS satellites. That's all your different citations that are floating around. We want to make sure that the name, address, phone, website is consistent across all of those. Number two, AI gold: getting frequent five-star reviews with all of the things that we talked about. Number three, adding a ton of local content to your website and Google Business Profile consistently, all the time. You cannot just set it and forget it. We've got to love our profile. Number four, establishing some other authority. Get on some podcasts. Like you get on someone else's podcast, they're going to do all the leg work. They're going to advertise you, right? You have a ton of local people in your market that are doing podcasts just about local things. Like, get on their podcast, do whatever you can. They're going to advertise you for free. Number five, we want everything to be conversational, to match up with that AEO. Right? When Google is recommending something at the top of a search, they're literally pulling from all these different things to answer people's questions before they even ask them. So we want everything to be conversational. Don't flatline, okay? You've got to stay consistent whenever we're adding things to our profiles. And lastly, local, local, local. Okay? All local authoritative content — neighborhood guides, the photos and local spots that we talked about, FAQs on your website. These are the easiest ways to make sure that Google starts to recommend us.

So, before we get into any — I'll stick around for Q&A as long as anybody wants to stick around, Larry. Of course, guys, we do this at LOC8 for real estate professionals. So if you're thinking about all this and you're like, "Bobby, this is great, but like I got to focus on relationships and selling seven houses this week, like Bea," okay? Then let's have a conversation and let us figure out how to do this best for you. This is all we do. All we do is work with real estate agents on how to optimize their Google Business Profile for better Google and AI visibility. We do it all. So let's have a conversation. That QR code on the right is how to schedule 30 free minutes with me, to just take a look at your profile and say, "Hey, it's doing great," or, "Hey, there's probably some room for improvement here, some opportunities." So jump on my calendar, scan the code on the right.

And if you could, please — I wouldn't be a very good Google guy if I didn't ask you for a Google review today. On helping you guys be masterful when it comes to your profiles moving forward. And of course, if you can, please use some keywords like my business name, LOC8. If you want to use my name, Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency, but say things like realtor, Google Business marketing, or real estate agent marketing, Google Business for realtors, things like that are super helpful. And hopefully you're kind of cementing what you're going to start asking of your clients when you leave me a review.

So, a lot of opportunity here to get better, guys. This is what we do. I literally dream about Google Business Profile, because it's what I'm doing all day every day — helping rockstar realtors like you. So Larry, thank you for the time, man. I hope this was very, very valuable.

Larry MF White: Man, the comments alone are telling me that it was worth it to a lot of different people. Guys, you know, I booked time with Bobby — and again, we're on the path to getting me out of Google jail at this point in time, which is super important. Kelly's also posted his free checklist and stuff as well. That's in there. And I think we got through most of the questions. Are there any questions that we didn't miss? We've got a few minutes and stuff to come back to, but man, people are raving here. So, you are absolute fire, Bobby. I appreciate you so much for jumping on here this morning.

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: Yeah, my pleasure. I woke up fired up this morning when Google announced some new stuff. I was like, "Oh, these people are going to love this. This is great." And I know — I'm a nerd. I get excited about Google Business Profile. You're thinking like, "What the hell did you like? Who is this guy, Larry?" But that's my gig, right? My job is to make Amanda Barber more visible on Google, so she can focus on selling houses. My job is to help Mike Schmitz kick ass on Google and be found on AI, so that he can focus on building relationships with community members. Like, you don't need to be a digital marketing specialist to make this win for you. Let's just have a conversation and I'll let you know how it goes. It's not rocket science. Like everything else in our business and in our world, it's consistency. We've just got to do these little things consistently and build them into our systems.

And then, like the review stuff — like, everyone should be knocking it out of the park with reviews. Like, build it into a campaign. The second you mark that that client closed, they should be getting a series of six review requests over the next week. And by the way, this is just a little tidbit — if you're not asking your clients for reviews multiple times, you're never going to get a lot of reviews, because think about the review psychology. People are very, very quick to leave a negative review, right? Something goes wrong at a restaurant — by God, the first thing you think of is, "I'm going to leave this place a nasty gram," right? But if you got a great server, is the first thing you think of, "I'm gonna leave this place a great five-star review, so that hopefully that server gets a nice little bump"? Like, no. People don't naturally do that. So we've got to really pull positive reviews out of our people.

So what I used to do with all my companies is, the second we marked them closed, then they would get an email and a text request for a Google five-star review. Three days — two days later, they would get another email and a text. And then three days after that, they would get one more text request. And I know some of you might be saying, "Bobby, like five, six requests, like my people are going to hate me." I've done this for so long and it's such a great success rate. I promise you, I have never had one person ever come back to me and say, "Bobby, shut up. Stop asking me for a review." This is what it takes to win on Google in 2026. And for those of you that still say, "There's no way I'm going to ask my people for five requests for a review," then you're probably a person who's not going to have very many Google reviews.

Larry MF White: Guys, we've been doing this literally since, you know, 2009, 2010, when my team was doing 300-plus deals a year. We had a schedule that my admin would send out after we got through the inspection period — "Hey, congratulations, we made it through this milestone. Could you do me a favor?" Boom. And then after we got through the appraisal — "Hey, oh my gosh, it came in at appraisal," or it didn't come in at appraisal and we renegotiated the contract for a better deal for our buyers — "Could you do me a favor?" And then at the closing and stuff as well. So this is not a new trick. It's just updated. Right. And now you have more places to be able to post it and get more visibility and stuff out of that as well.

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: Yeah. The only caveat to that is if something goes sideways between the inspection period and closing — like, who do they usually blame, right? So look, we only did it on the good ones. Like, we didn't — if a crummy inspection came in, we didn't say, "Hey, could you tell us about this experience?" Right? Like, we were smart on when we did that. So yes, it's not carte blanche — like, "Hey, we're going to do this for everybody every single time." You might not even like some of your clients and you know that they're not going to like it. Use your best judgment. Follow your gut feeling on this. But on those smooth transactions, when you accomplish those milestones, when you get them to the next level and stuff like that, highlight those experiences.

Here is what we had the most success with, on top of the review campaigns. If you're the person that goes to closings — okay, show of hands, anybody still go to closings and meet clients at some point? Okay, so I'm sure this is not a good example because it's a coaster, but it's about the same size as what I'm going to recommend. We've all probably seen these — you can get these acrylic squares, like clear plastic that looks like glass. Okay? You can go to like Vistaprint or Custom Ink or whatever. Get a custom acrylic glass block and have a QR code printed on it that goes to your Google Business Profile review link, and bring it to your closings and set it on the table. And after they've signed and they're at the happiest they've ever been with you, have them scan that code. Have a piece of paper that says, "Hey, please mention these things." They'll scan it right with you sitting right there, and then you say, "Let's take a picture." So when they're the happiest, you're collecting the review. They're listing all the things you want them to list. They're adding a photograph. And now you're walking away — you don't even have to worry about a five- or six-step review campaign, because you took care of it when they were the happiest.

Because I promise you, as soon as they walk out that door, the last thing that they're thinking about is leaving you a five-star review. They're thinking about unpacking. They're thinking about moving in. They're thinking about moving kids to schools. They're thinking about finding that new grocery store that they've got to go to. Right? So get them when they're the most happy and excited. It'd be the same thing as if at the end I didn't have my review QR code on there and then I emailed everybody a week from now — like, it's going to drop in terms of the rate of people that would leave me a review. It's the same concept for all of us at closing. So try to take advantage of when your clients are the most excited about your service, and that's usually clear-to-close and then at the closing table.

Larry MF White: Beautiful, man. Bobby, you lit it up this morning. So grateful for you, my friend. Guys, I hope you took some action items. Again, this will be on YouTube and stuff a little bit later today after we download the recording. We will have all of the links and stuff that are included — from the checklist to the five-star Google review to the book-now option and stuff, in case you're driving, in case you missed anything here. I hope that you got as much value out of this as I did. And this is just the start of a relationship with Bobby. We'll get him back here, you know, after a few months, because again, it's constantly changing and we have to constantly change as well. So, Bobby, I appreciate you. Group, I appreciate you guys so much. Go out there and crush it this week. And if you need anything, make sure that you reach out — call, text, or email me. We'll talk to you guys soon. Have a great day.

Bobby Kerr, Founder of LOC8 My Business - Real Estate Marketing Agency: Thanks, guys. Have a great day.

Larry MF White: Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.