Bobby Kerr of LOC8 My Business on the Keeping It Real Podcast with DJ Paris

Transcript cleaned from the episode recording. Speaker names are DJ Paris (host) and Bobby Kerr (guest).

[0:00] DJ Paris: Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping It Real, the largest podcast made by real estate agents and for real estate agents. My name is DJ Paris. I am your guide and host through the show. Today I am super excited to bring on our guest. This is a topic that doesn't get enough attention. It is going to help your business in so many ways. I have seen it impact my business — rather our brokerage's business — in so many positive ways, and most agents are going to not know about this or not spend any time on it. So we are talking today about Google My Business, and our guest is Bobby Kerr.

Let me tell you more about Bobby. He is the founder of LOC8 — that's LOC, the number 8 — so, LOC8 My Business, a real estate marketing agency focused entirely on Google Business Profile optimization. He's optimized and trained more than a thousand real estate agents and profiles — Google My Business for solo agents, teams, and brokerages all across the US and Canada. Before LOC8, Bobby started, scaled, and sold multiple real estate businesses. He understands this industry. He was in home inspections, mortgage, property and casualty, and real estate sales. So he has actually been in this business and has worked with thousands of clients also in the business. His Authority Engine system turns an agent's profile into hyperlocal content that ranks in Google Maps and gets cited by AI like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. He teaches live webinars and workshops every single week on Google-first visibility for realtors. His message is simple: Google is the first step in the consumer journey, and your business profile is the front door.

I could not agree with him more. Every time I am looking for a vendor — like for example I have a dent in my car and I didn't know where to go — I Google "best dent removal company" or "best auto body shop" and I literally just look at the reviews, because all I care about is who's got the best reviews and the most. And we're going to talk about how you can get more reviews for yourself. I want you to follow Bobby everywhere, but particularly on Instagram — he is @TheBobbyKerr. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. He's on all the social platforms, and I want you to visit his website, which is loc8mybusiness.com. Also a link to that in the show notes. Bobby, welcome.

[2:39] Bobby Kerr: Hey DJ, thanks so much man. I'm really excited to be here. I've been listening to the show for a long time and I'm just a big fan of your energy. I think that matters a lot in a show like this. So I'm really excited to be here.

[2:53] DJ Paris: Well, I appreciate that. I was going to make some sort of drug reference that gets me the energy I need, but the truth is I just get excited to talk to people like you. Really, I've been doing this for eight years, and I don't practice real estate as an agent myself, but it inspires me to do better in my own business. I recruit agents, and even though I don't always do the things that my guests do, I am so honored to speak to people who are here to help make agents' lives better like yourself. So I appreciate you. Okay, I'm going to jump right in. You have a client in Annapolis, Maryland, who said that she picked up a brand new listing the first week after you rebuilt her Google Business Profile, and a second one the week after that. So I want the boring version of the story, not the highlights. Like, what was actually on the profile before you touched it and what changed after you touched it?

[3:55] Bobby Kerr: I think I know who you're talking about. I obviously went through our Google reviews on our page, so that's pretty cool. I think you're talking about Miss Lowry, if I remember correctly. The cool thing is you can actually have a profile that's somewhat built out the right way and built structurally strong, but it doesn't necessarily have a few tweaks that might get more noticeable activity from Google or from the LLMs. For that particular profile, if I remember correctly, it really wasn't a massive change, but there are some specific parts of a Google profile that honestly 99% of real estate professionals don't even know to touch. For us to go right to the point of where we need to go — whether it's the services section, or the posting format, or the products, or the offers, or tweaking the review templates — there's all these cool little nuances that actually do move the needle when done the right way.

So in this particular example, it was probably having to do with the correct verbiage of her services, because she was getting reviews but she didn't know that this one particular portion of the Google Business Profile actually is what communicates with Google's AI Overviews, which pulls directly from Google Business Profile. So I'm glad you mentioned that one — that was a really good plug for us. Thank you.

[5:21] DJ Paris: It's amazing. I mean, getting a listing from Google reviews is incredible. You know, I should probably take a step back. I just jumped right into Google. Let's make the case for why Google My Business is relevant and important to agents.

[5:36] Bobby Kerr: Sure. In the intro, you said it — in 2026 we're in a different world than we were. You and I were speaking about 1999, the infancy of the internet. To be perfectly honest, nothing really changed that much from 1999 until 2024 in terms of SEO — now AEO, GEO, all the "EOs." The principles were the same, and to be perfectly honest they kind of are still the same for the main foundational principles. However, now the Google Business Profile, whether it's getting a business recommended in an LLM search query — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc. — a lot of times people are going straight to the Google profile as opposed to a website.

You mentioned it in the intro: whether you're checking out a new restaurant, or a shoe store, or a bar, or a local service business, people are going straight to Google or an LLM to say, "Hey, who's the best to do this one particular thing?" And a lot of times that result that's popping up is not necessarily a website — it's the business profile with a link to the reviews. If you want to be visible on the world's biggest platform — number one, which is YouTube and Google, traditional Google search and now YouTube — you've got to be present with an optimized, highly visible, highly engaging, and hyperlocal Google Business Profile with a ton of reviews.

[7:09] DJ Paris: Yeah, and we should just be really blunt about this. The large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. — they're all pulling, if you ask a hyperlocal question about a retailer or a business, that's where they're pulling data from. They are looking at the reviews first and foremost. That Google review system is very well trusted. It's accepted as honorable and honest, and so it is a huge thing. The reason I use it more than visiting a business's website is that most business websites aren't super well-designed, in my opinion, or at least not to the design that I would want. If I want to know if a business is any good, I know the business is going to tell me on their website that they're good, because everybody's going to tell you how great they are, whether they're a real estate agent or a donut shop. That doesn't tell me anything. When I go to the reviews, that tells me everything — or at least it tells me what the customers think.

So many agents spend a lot of money on their personal website. I'm not saying you shouldn't have one — I think you should, and it should look really nice. But they really neglect the free page that Google hands them for their business. You're basically telling our audience, "You built the house, but you boarded up the front door." So let's make the case: what is the website still useful for, and what is the Google Business page really most used for?

[9:05] Bobby Kerr: Sure. I think I'll break this up into two parts. Number one, everyone thinks the Google Business Profile — and I'll just abbreviate from here, I'll say GBP; it's Google Business Profile, used to be called Google My Business, they rebranded it — everyone thinks it's for the name, address, phone, website, review collection, and maybe a logo and a business description. Those are like the seven or eight data points that everyone thinks that's what the business profile is for. But really, it's a living, breathing social media platform. It has a post section, it has an offer section, it has an events section, it has a product section. The photos and videos that you add to the profile itself — not as posts, but added to the profile — those are ranking factors, ranking signals, and trust signals. This is a living, breathing tool that Google looks at in real time.

There's a massive recency bias, DJ. When you are not active on your Google profile and you've used it as a set-it-and-forget-it tool to collect some reviews or just have your logo, your photo, and some business information like name, address, phone — Google looks at your business on like a 30 or 45 day clock. If you have not been active on your Google Business Profile and having active reviews coming in in real time, they view your business as a dying or dead business. As an example: if DJ the Realtor has a Google Business Profile with a hundred reviews and all those reviews came from 2025 and before, and we're sitting here in August of 2026 but no new reviews have come in — as an ego trip, DJ the Realtor thinks his profile is strong because he has 100 five-star reviews. But in Google's eyes, they look at your profile and say, "No new reviews since December of 2025 — that actually makes us think DJ's business is completely dead. He's got no new clients, no real life customers talking about his business, no active posts. This business is not worth promoting in search results, so we're going to suppress it." And that's what happens all the time.

So to answer your question, what do people use it for? They're using it a lot of times in the wrong way — as a place to just get a few reviews and house their information. But really, it needs to be a breathing, living extension of the type of business that you want to portray to the public.

You mentioned "you boarded up the windows" — that's the metaphor you used. Whenever we do our webinars and coaching and teachings, I actually start with a metaphor I call the "dark house realtor" metaphor. So imagine a real estate agent listing the most beautiful house in the entire world, but every showing must happen at night and all the lights must remain turned off. Okay? That is what your business is as a real estate professional. Buyers can't see the value, co-op agents can't see the value, no one's going to stop in because it's dark and scary, even though it's a beautiful house. That is your business as a real estate professional if your Google Business Profile is dead — if you've got no new reviews coming in, you're missing geographical anchors in all of the content, if it's not completely optimized, if you have minimal activity across the internet. That's the dark house metaphor. So I love that you started out with that. Where we need to get them to start focusing is hyperlocal, consistent activity to signal to Google and all the AI search tools that your business is living and breathing and totally kicking butt.

[13:18] DJ Paris: Yeah. One of the things that people think about when they think about Google Business — probably the first thing — are reviews. Reviews are critical, and we all know we should be asking for more reviews. We should provide the direct link for Zillow and for Google — those are the two biggest places for realtors. But we don't have a lot of control over who clicks those links and fills out those reviews. It depends on our production, it depends on our relationship with the customer. What is predictable, what you can control, and what Bobby was just talking about, is content. You probably don't think of Google Business as a place to post content, but it is. You can post videos, short-form videos, image posts. You can't control the number of reviews that come in, but you can control the amount of content you're creating. When the large language models or Google look at these profiles, they want to see activity. So how important is it to post consistently, Bobby?

[14:38] Bobby Kerr: I think most social platforms in general — we've known for 10 years now — posting consistently is obviously very important, and I don't know why anyone would think Google, the world's largest data set on planet Earth, would be any different. There's kind of a magic number in the industry: adding posts to your Google Business Profile three to five days minimum. This three-to-five number is going to come up again when we jump into reviews. Posting to your profile every couple of days minimum, twice a week minimum, is kind of the watermark. But the type of content that we're posting is really, really important.

Actually, you did an episode a couple of weeks ago — or maybe last week — with Carrie McCormack. That was a great episode. She was speaking specifically a lot about Chicago, but she was really driving home the idea of hyperlocal content, no matter the platform. That is what we teach — it's the type of content that we create for people for their Google profile, and that's what's moving the needle.

When Google is evaluating a business in milliseconds, they're looking at all kinds of things — your Google profile, your other socials, your YouTube channel, your stats, Zillow, Homes.com, Realtor.com — to decide if you fit a searcher's intent. When you start to put generic, commoditized content on your Google profile, Google in real time is evaluating you to say, "Is this a community expert or is this a commodity? Is this something anyone can find anywhere else?"

Perfect example: the director of Google Search — his name is Danny Sullivan — did an internal TED-talk type discussion at Alphabet back in April, and he put up a slide. I love this because the slide actually had a real estate example. The example showed two columns: commoditized content versus non-commoditized content — content you can find anywhere else at 10,000 other business profiles versus content individualistic to one particular person or business.

We've all seen countless agents — a lot of us have been guilty of it — there's a post that somebody puts up on Facebook or Instagram or Google Business Profile that says "Seven spring cleaning tips for buyers or sellers this year" or "for homeowners." And then it says "clean your gutters, make sure the dirt's sloped away from the foundation." That is commoditized content — I can find that slop anywhere else. An example of non-commoditized content for the same type of thing would be "seven spring cleaning tips for first-time homebuyers in Cape Coral, Florida." Right away, that content cannot be found anywhere else. Give very specific hyperlocal geographical anchor content within the post and within the graphic. Google is quite literally suppressing those commoditized profiles because they say, "I don't need to promote 10,000 mirrors of 10,000 other agents. We need to showcase and promote businesses that are hyperlocal community experts."

Google doesn't want to see you posting "just sold," "recently listed." I think you and Carrie even talked about that — they don't want to see billboard content. They want to see that you're a local community expert. I've said that now three times because I want the people in the back to really hear it: it's not about you just promoting "I'm an awesome real estate agent." It's "I'm here to educate, I'm here to provide value, value, value so that Google trusts me more and showcases my business in search results."

[19:13] DJ Paris: Well said. What I want to encourage everyone to do with what Bobby just said is think about hyperlocal. If you live in Chicago, like I do, we have 77 neighborhoods. Clearly you can't be an expert in all 77 neighborhoods, but maybe you can be an expert in one of them. You might want to create hyperlocal content about what's going on in that specific community, posting it on Google My Business. That doesn't mean you won't also work other places, but if you plant your flag and brand in one location, think about what type of content people who live in that area, or want to move to that area, actually care about. We all have AI now — you can ask AI to see what people care about who are thinking about moving into this area. That could be your content, whether short-form video or images.

For those of you thinking, "I don't really look at Google Business much" — fair enough. But what you're probably doing instead is asking AI, "Hey, find me the three best mechanics in the area, the best dentists." That's what AI is doing. AI is going in and finding this. So whether the individual is clicking on the Google Business account, or if it's asking Claude, they are both sourcing it from the same location, and that is through Google.

[21:03] Bobby Kerr: That's a great point, DJ. As people are saying, "Well I don't even use Google Search anymore, I just go straight to ChatGPT or Gemini" — that's totally fine, a lot of people are doing that. I want to give a quick stat to paint the picture of where things were versus where they are versus where they're going in this new agentic age. January 2024 — barely two and a half years ago — AI search was less than 1% of all internet search traffic. It was just ChatGPT at the time. June of 2024, two years ago, it had risen to 2.5% — a rather big jump in six months. Fast forward to June of 2026, not even two full months ago, we're at over 15% of all internet search traffic coming through AI tools. That's almost a 1,000% jump in how people are finding local businesses.

The more that AI tools are smarter, the more specific those searchers are getting. They're not saying "who's the best agent in Chicago" — that's way too wide a net. People want to know, "Hey, I'm a first-time home buyer in the Lincoln Park area. I need somebody who's great and patient who works with first-time home buyers and has experience working with someone with an overbearing father." They're asking really, really specific questions. The more proactively you can answer these questions in all of your content, the more likely the LLMs and Google and AI Overviews are willing to grab ahold of your content because the search matches.

Google ranks businesses and promotes businesses based on three things: prominence, relevance, and proximity. Prominence is how popular are you — how often are you getting reviews, how strong are the reviews. Relevance is how well does your profile line up with the searcher's intent — if your profile has content built up about real estate and those specific neighborhoods you want to target, your service areas and very specific niche things. The proximity factor: for people that don't know this, Google Business Profile is run and powered by Google Maps — that happened about two and a half years ago. Everything is about geographical anchors. Your posts, your services, your products, your photos have a massive relevance and ranking factor because it's all tied to geographical locations — because what powers Google Business Profile is Google Maps.

I know we're jumping around a little bit, but it's important for everyone to understand the holistic thirty-thousand-foot view: this is not a place to just get a couple of reviews, or to just have your name and address and phone. This is a place to make sure that Google, and in turn the LLMs, understand that your business is a living, breathing thing.

[24:39] DJ Paris: Yeah, well said. I'm glad we're making the point, because realtors tend to over-focus on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Those are fine, but those are all pretty disposable content houses — content flows through them, lives briefly, and then is never seen again. Whereas Google in particular — Google Business and YouTube — that content kind of lives forever, becomes searchable, and becomes what the LLMs look for. We're making the case very well for Google My Business and putting more attention to it. Now let's start at the beginning. For anyone who hasn't touched their Google Business Profile in a couple of years, what's the first thing they should do?

[25:35] Bobby Kerr: If they already have one, the first thing is just make sure you can log on, on a desktop and through your mobile device. Because most people that haven't touched theirs in a long time don't understand that it's powered by Google Maps. You've got to log in to your Google Maps app on your phone to manage your Google Business Profile. That's the first thing people always ask — "I don't even know how to get there." Open up Google Maps on your cell phone and make sure you're logged into the Gmail account that manages your business profile. That's the only way you'll be able to access it through Maps.

Now you've got a profile that's set up. Honestly, the first thing I would do — the number one ranking factor — is start focusing on recapturing some recent reviews, because if you haven't been paying attention to it, most likely that's fallen by the wayside. Reviews is really going to be the important thing. Number one, it also will be really easy to add some photographs. Inevitably everyone's got 10,000 or more photos on their phone — photos of yourself out in the wild doing the job: with a yard sign in your hand, working with clients at closings, in front of a house that says "just listed." Add those photos to your business profile, because you're sending signals — Google calls them trust signals — that your business is alive, and that you're actually doing the job that you say you do.

You have a category on your Google profile. Inevitably everyone listening is either a real estate agent, real estate agency, or real estate consultant as their primary category. When you add photos holding a yard sign, or in front of a house, or with clients at a title office, or wearing branded gear for your brokerage — all of that is a trust signal that Google says, "Yep, there's a confirmation that they're out there in the wild doing the thing that they say they do, in the service area where they say they do it." Those would be some really quick hits of what people can do to immediately shake their Google profile back up, to wake up, to start signaling to Google that the business is alive and well.

[27:44] DJ Paris: Thank you for that, really great advice. I also want to talk about services, because this is the field I hear you talk about more than any other, and you are a big fan of the services option. Most people put two or three services, maybe four. You do a lot more than that. Tell us how we should think about adding our services within the profile.

[28:10] Bobby Kerr: Number one, today is all about value — we're giving away the keys to the castle, so hopefully everyone takes this stuff. When you talk about the services section of the Google profile, we've looked at and optimized a thousand Google Business Profiles, predominantly 95% real estate agents and brokerages. I can count on one hand out of all of those where I got into a business profile the first time and the services were not bare-bones and generic. This is a section that agents just don't do anything with, and it's not their fault, DJ. Here's why: when you create your Google Business Profile and tell Google "here's my primary category, real estate agent, real estate agency," when you get to the services section, Google says, "Hey DJ, you're a real estate agent. Here are 25 or 30 services you should add" — first-time home buyer services, investor relations services, listing agent services, buyer agent services. And you go down the list and click "add, add, add," and then you walk away and say, "Man, Google now knows what I do."

What you don't understand is if you scroll down a little bit more, there's a little hidden button that says "custom services." You can customize all of these to be hyperlocal, to name-drop your business. When you just use the generic ones Google gives you, all it does is say "okay cool, you're complete, you've told us what you do." But when you click on those services in the edit section, it gives you 300 characters to add a custom service description to go with every service. Unless you're doing that, Google quite literally doesn't know what you do besides your category or your reviews. When you proactively add all these custom services, you're sending massive trust signals that "here's more proof, more social proof, that DJ the real estate agent works with not just generic first-time home buyers, but first-time home buyers in a specific neighborhood in a specific city."

Not to mention the AI Overviews in Google — when you do a traditional search and it gives you AI Overviews trying to give you one, two, or three recommendations — those AI Overviews are pulling directly from Google Business Profiles, and they're looking in the services section to make sure the relevance factor lines up with the searcher's intent. If you leave that section completely blank or don't customize it, Google basically just doesn't know what to do with you.

[31:37] DJ Paris: That is so absolutely true, and I'm realizing I have neglected to get hyperlocal and specific about what our brokerage does. The other thing I was thinking while you were talking — when you're filling out services that Google gives you suggestions for, everyone's clicking on the same stuff. If you're a real estate agent, they're probably going to serve up the same exact service tags for everybody. I didn't even realize that. I thought those were the established ones. But you're right — people search hyperlocally, and it would be a smarter play to put the hyperlocal geographical designation, something really specific to what you do.

[32:36] Bobby Kerr: And honestly, for ten years none of this really changed. We weren't talking about creating such hyperlocal content on the Google Business Profile because it wasn't really necessary. If you had great SEO, a strong website, and a strong Google profile — even with generic services or no services — you could shoot up the map pack rankings because you had citations across ten other platforms and reviews on all of them, and Google just said "yep, we trust this business" and pushed it to the top. Now, when we're looking at LLMs — the agentic AI's eyeballs are our target audience, because they're the ones recommending us — we have to convince them that we're trustworthy, local, and specific. The only way to do that is to actually coach these language models and AI tools on what we do, why we're the best, and where we do it specifically. Otherwise we're just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks.

[33:53] DJ Paris: So we should really think about first optimizing our existing profile with services, and your company can help do that for agents, since you already know the growth hacks. And then there's a content strategy play as well. We have to get more reviews, post more content. One question I have around posting content: what type of content — you talked about photos, and image posts which are maybe not photos but informational — what works really well that agents could start creating and publishing on Google?

[34:50] Bobby Kerr: Again, keys to the castle today, everybody — this is the stuff that moves the needle. Question-and-answer format posting is what's moving the needle. That's not a Google-specific thing, that's learning to be pretty universal. When someone's asking those specific questions of an AI tool or Google itself, those tools are trying to answer directly and connect the dots — "here's this person searching this one very specific thing, and we're going to try to line them up with a business or person who has content that matches." So question-and-answer format, proactively answering the questions people are actually asking, is what's moving the needle.

When we create content for people's Google Business Profiles, it's not generic like "what is the median home price in Chicago, Illinois?" — that's commoditized, because I can find that content anywhere. Let me give a bad versus good example to paint the picture of the type of content you can add as a post. I'm not going to name specific companies, but we all know them — you can connect your Google profile or Facebook or Instagram to a third party and they'll post for you. We've all seen that. That's usually the generic slop that gets suppressed because it's commoditized. We're working with an agent right now whose third party company she was paying $99 a month posted things like: a graphic with the words "listing agent" and the definition — "did you know a listing agent or seller's agent is a real estate pro dedicated to helping clients sell their property by expertly listing it on the market?" Oh my gosh, earth-shattering stuff. Google and the LLMs know they've seen that exact same graphic and post across 20,000 other profiles, so it's immediately flagged for commoditized content.

Here's an example of a good piece of content. Question: "How much should I budget for closing costs when I'm buying a new home in Naples, Florida?" Answer — literally typing the words "question" and "answer" — "Southwest Florida lifestyle living of Brenton Maybach advises Naples home buyers to budget 3 to 5% of the purchase price for total closing costs. Brenton breaks this down: loan origination fees 0.5% to 1%, title insurance fees, inspection, appraisal, etc. Naples properties over $1 million may have higher title insurance costs." See the difference? Very hyperlocal, mentioning the business name, mentioning the specific realtor, mentioning three different times the geographical anchors, specific numbers for different costs. That is hyperlocal, not commoditized — you're not going to find that post anywhere else. Going full circle, DJ: ask yourself before you post something, "can someone else find this information somewhere else?"

[38:30] DJ Paris: And are you talking about posting this information as an image post, as a graphic with this information?

[38:40] Bobby Kerr: On the business profile, when you click posts, there's three different types. One is called "update" — that's like your traditional Facebook/Instagram post. You can add a photo or video, text copy, and even a link back to your website or a YouTube video. Then you've got "offers," which is tricky for real estate professionals because they say "what do you mean, offer? Am I going to offer 20% off this house?" That's not a thing. Honestly, when we're utilizing all the tools within the Google Business Profile, it's less about adding an offer so a human sees it and calls. It's about signaling to Google that we're utilizing all of their tools — because when we use their tools, they're happy, they're giving them to us for free on the world's biggest platform. And we're signaling to the AI models, "hey look, he's got an offer, he's talking about this one specific thing."

To be perfectly honest, the offer section is more about rewarding one of your services to appear as an offer. As a service you might say "free in-home visits for a competitive market analysis in Naples, Florida." That's a service you can turn into a product and into an offer — "free home evaluation, competitive market analysis" as the title, geographically anchored, and then in the body you get into it more. So these are the kinds of things. You can add an image or video to go with your posts, or a graphic or video as a standalone photo/video on your profile. There's lots of places to house this great content.

And 93% of agents — that's a true stat — 93% of agents don't leverage any social media tool, let alone Google Business Profile. That's a stat from Real Grader, a big company that does social media posting for real estate agents specifically. 93%. So be in the 7% that automatically starts to float to the top. If Google trusts you, then large language models are going to start to trust you a little more too. Google Business Profile is king, but it's not the only game in town — you've got to be elsewhere too. But if you're not on Google Business Profile, you're solidifying the fact that you're going to be a ghost in this agentic age.

[41:58] DJ Paris: Yeah, because very soon we will not be going to google.com; we will be speaking to our phones and asking questions directly to AI, and AI is going to pull directly from Google and all the other places where it grabs data. Can I add one more thing there?

[42:20] Bobby Kerr: Yes. This is a stat from Darren Sparks, owner of Whitespark, a big social media company. When people go to the LLMs to do their searching, here's what happens post-recommendation from ChatGPT or Gemini: 53% of searchers go straight to Google to verify what the LLM recommended. So for those agents saying "I'm already getting plenty of leads from ChatGPT or Gemini" or "I get all my business from referrals" — people are still going to go straight to Google to look at your reviews and content to make sure the recommendation was accurate. This is not a one-stop. It's all very much interconnected.

[43:10] DJ Paris: I totally agree. I want to pivot a bit to talk specifically about reviews. Let's give some short, quick best practices — do this, don't do this — because all of us, if you've been in business long enough, you will have a one-star review. It's coming for you, whether it's valid or not. When we get one of those unfortunate reviews, it hits us in the gut. We get the email from Google, "hey you just got a one-star." What's the best way to address that?

[43:49] Bobby Kerr: For negative reviews, the best thing is: number one, address it. Do not bury your head in the sand. Always respond publicly, always respond politely, always offer up some type of solution, and we always coach to try to take the conversation offline. Say publicly "oh my gosh, we're so sorry," or — some people get weird about apologizing for something they didn't do wrong — "I'm so sorry your experience wasn't top-notch, we'd love to make this right. We can't find you in our database if it's a fraudulent review, or we'd love to have this conversation to see how we can remedy it. Here's our number, would you mind emailing us or calling?" Those are the tips for negative reviews — address it head-first, never bury your head, because those people need to be heard.

Also, that's why it's important to get a lot of positive ones. If you've got ten reviews or five reviews and you get a negative one, your average rating suddenly approaches the threes. So you've got to get a lot of reviews. Kind of onto the positive review piece — this is going to be gold for everybody. We call it the "holy grail of a five-star review." For real estate agents, reviews are like big ego plays — we get that dopamine rush when we get a five-star review, and it doesn't matter what it says, we're just happy we got it. But here's the thing: it matters to Google what's in the review, and it matters to the LLMs — it's a massive ranking factor.

The holy grail of a five-star review has five tips. Number one, get five stars — that way if you get negative ones, it suppresses those. Number two, the reviewer needs to mention the business by name. They can't just say "great experience, loved working with them" — that doesn't prove to Google or the LLMs that you're a living, breathing business, or that a real human left that review. They need to mention the business name, and more importantly, as it appears on the Google Business Profile. For instance, if someone reviews Kale Realty and says "I had a great experience with DJ, he was awesome, five stars" — there's a little disconnect because "DJ" isn't in the business profile's name. They can still mention DJ, but mentioning the business name is important.

Tip number three: they need to mention geographical anchors — the city, the state, and even the neighborhood or street name where the transaction took place. For real estate this is the easiest of all industries, because you're doing business at a specific address on a specific street in a specific neighborhood.

Number four: they've got to mention hot keywords that signify your excellence. "DJ sold my house in only five days and above asking price. We closed in less than 30 days. I wouldn't hire another agent for my specific neighborhood if my life depended on it. DJ at Kale Realty is the best real estate agent in the Chicago area." Very specific hot keywords that signify your excellence.

And tip number five: if the reviewer can leave a photograph — because you can add photos to reviews — that signifies to Google that again, a real life human being, a real life customer, left a review for this real life business. That's the holy grail, five steps. When agents start looking at their reviews and think "oh man, they didn't mention me by name, they didn't mention the city or state, they definitely didn't mention the street or neighborhood, and all they said was 'highly recommend'" — that's a big disconnect with Google. You've got to have these elements to make sure your reviews are powerful, because Google reads the reviews and the LLMs read the reviews. On LOC8's business profile, we've got 260 five-star reviews, and when each one mentions "Google Business Profile optimization for real estate agents," who do you think all these LLMs are going to start to recommend when the language is very similar? If they mention just "Bobby Kerr" as opposed to "LOC8 My Business and Bobby Kerr," there's a disconnect. So we coach our clients not on exactly what to say, but the parameters and guardrails of what to incorporate in their own words.

[49:14] DJ Paris: That brings me to the question: how do we ask, with some of these parameters that we want to be mentioned? What's the process for going to a client and saying "I would really appreciate a review, and here are some guidelines"?

[49:37] Bobby Kerr: Number one, this goes back to my real estate operator days — I was running a home inspection company, VP of a mortgage company, insurance, real estate sales. No matter your industry, you have to request reviews when your customer is the happiest. That's step one. If you're sending an email post-close, those people have moved on — they're literally worried about their movers, getting their kids enrolled in schools, finding the local pizza joint, before they've got all their food in their pantry. They don't care about leaving a review even though you've bent over backwards for 30, 60, or 90 days. So make the request at a very poignant time. We always recommend at the closing table.

If you're an agent that still goes to closings, you do not have a better opportunity than to get that review right then and there. I recommend those clear acrylic blocks — get a custom QR code printed on it with a direct link to your Google review page. When you're sitting at the closing, all you do is put that right in front of them when they're happiest, they've got their keys, have them take a photo with you, and have them do the review right then and there. Coach them — whether on paper or printed on that review block — "please mention me by name, geographical anchors, talk about a problem I helped solve, leave five stars." Now all of a sudden the process of getting a powerful review, you just took care of it standing there with them.

[51:30] DJ Paris: I think you have to give them "here's what would really help me in my business — giving me a five-star review about that." And beyond that is to get specific: think about a problem I helped solve, let's talk about what I actually did for you, let's take a photo. If someone I appreciate asks me "would you leave a review, and would you do it in a certain way?" the answer is always of course. So if anyone's listening thinking "I don't want to ask, it feels uncomfortable" — yes, maybe if the client isn't happy don't do it. But if you've done a good job and your client is extremely happy at the closing table, you should say, "Hey, the hardest part about this business is finding clients. The best marketing I have is my existing clients. If you're happy with the way this transaction has gone and how I've performed, this is the best way you can help me." Most people will be honored to help you.

[52:56] Bobby Kerr: Absolutely, it's great. Number one, if you're a great agent, the first time you meet people you should be setting the tone: "I want this to be a five-star experience for you." Then when you finish the transaction, weeks or months later, you can say "did I live up to my promise? Was this a five-star experience?" And when you send those email or text campaigns, there's some psychology involved. When you say the words — and this should be the subject line, to be perfectly honest — "Can you help me?" Something triggers psychologically, and they say "whatever it is, I'm going to help DJ, because all he did was answer my midnight texts for the last 90 days of me freaking out about my transaction." Then you basically say, "Hey, it's Bobby at XYZ Realty. Can you help us? We're on a mission to get to 25, 50, 200, whatever reviews — five-star Google reviews. It really helps other buyers and sellers in our market find us and have a great experience as well. It also helps if you mention these things: my name, the city, the state, the neighborhood, a specific problem we helped you solve, and if you can add a photograph, even better." All of a sudden you're coaching them what to say without giving them specifics.

That could be unethical if you send them something and say "hey, just copy and paste this" — I would never recommend that. A, because it's unethical. B, because your reviews start to look the same and Google's going to catch on, and if you go to Google jail it's really hard to get out.

[54:59] DJ Paris: Yeah, that used to happen. There's certainly a black market for review buying and selling, but you don't have to go down that path. You just have to be excellent and coach your clients on what helps your business the most.

[55:14] DJ Paris: So I just realized I need to do more with my Google Business Profile — I need to create more content, get more reviews, do all of this, because the LLMs are feeding off this information and people are still going to Google and direct searching. I'm sold. Tell us about what your business does.

[55:41] Bobby Kerr: Absolutely. As you said in the intro, we are truly a real estate-specific Google Business Profile marketing agency. We know how valuable this tool is. We either create new profiles for agents that don't already have them, or we take an existing profile and optimize it. We know the formatting of the content that needs to go on these profiles, and essentially we build them out. Everything is hyperlocal, everything is truly customized — so if we've helped another agent in your city, they're not getting any of the same content.

To be perfectly honest, and you've talked about this on other shows, the more niche and specific you are as an agent, the more likely you are to succeed. If you're just a real estate agent that says "I want to help all buyers and sellers and all investors in Chicago, Illinois," you're going to find nobody because you're so generic, so vanilla. The more specific you can get in your business approach, the more specific we can get in creating content that actually moves the needle. We help with reviews, and not only a one-time optimization — which is our flagship program — but also helping agents on a monthly basis.

You need to be focused on building relationships — meeting referral partners, building relationships with buyers, sellers, and investors. You don't need to become a Google marketing expert to win on this thing. Call somebody like us and visit our website. We can help you on a one-time basis if that's all you need. If you're the kind of person who loves working within your own Google profile but doesn't know the content to add or the formatting, we create content for people and send it in a Word doc so they can copy and paste it into their own profile. Or we can do a one-stop shop on a monthly basis. We truly have market share on Google Business Profile for real estate agents because this is what we focus on. We don't do Meta, we don't do YouTube, we do websites occasionally, but we focus on one thing — and that's the niche model, so we can be better than anybody else in the entire world.

[58:02] DJ Paris: I love that. You've sold me. I want everybody to visit loc8mybusiness.com — LOC8 is LOC, the number 8, mybusiness.com. Link to that in the show notes. You can book a free call with Bobby and his team, and they can take a look. The thing that really gets me most about why this is so important is that Google Business is very underutilized by other real estate agents. We're all posting on social media because we want those dopamine hits of likes and comments and shares from Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. But that's where everybody is playing. Very few people are playing on Google Business Profile. It doesn't mean you should ignore the others, but you should have a strategy here. This absolutely works. With the advent of AI, it has become so obvious to me when I do searches that this is where information is pulled. People ask "who is the best agent in my neighborhood?" and it's going to look at Zillow reviews and Google reviews — those are the two primary places — and it's also going to look at who sold the most homes there. You really need a strategy, and Bobby's company can help you figure that out. Please visit loc8mybusiness.com.

I also want you to follow Bobby on social media at @TheBobbyKerr all over his different platforms — links in the show notes. On behalf of our audience, Bobby, thank you so much for all of the great content and advice you gave us today about Google Business. I still call it Google My Business — I need to remember that's not called that anymore. That's how long I've been playing around with Google Business.

And on behalf of Bobby and myself, thank you to the audience for sticking around to the end. This is such a great example of why I do this show — I bet you weren't thinking about Google Business before you listened, and I bet you've got a couple of to-dos you can execute immediately. The best way you can help us is by telling a friend — think of another realtor that could benefit from hearing this episode, and I think all of them could. Shoot them a link to this episode, share it with them. We appreciate you. Support our sponsors as well — they keep the show running. We'll see everybody on the next episode.