You do not have a Google Business Profile yet

Your Business Profile is the thing that shows up in the map when somebody searches for an agent near them, and it is the part of your online presence that moves fastest. A website takes months. A profile can be visible in weeks. If you do not have one, this is the place to start, and it is worth doing carefully, because the two things people get wrong here are the two things that are hardest to undo.

This is Google's process, not ours. We cannot create a profile for you, and nobody can: Google verifies the business, and it has to be you. What we can do is tell you what the rules actually are before you fill the form in.

First, check you are eligible for your own profile

Google's guidelines treat an individual practitioner as eligible for their own profile, and they name real estate agents as an example. So yes, in principle you can have a profile in your own name, separate from your brokerage.

There is one case where you should not. If you are the only public facing agent working under your brokerage's brand at that location, Google's guidelines point to a single combined profile named for the brand and the practitioner together rather than a second standalone one. If your brokerage has a profile at an office where you are the only agent, read that section of Google's guidelines before you create anything, or ask your broker how they want it handled. Creating a duplicate is the fastest way to have both profiles suspended.

If your brokerage has an office with several agents, a profile in your own name based where you actually work is the normal arrangement.

The name field, which is where most agents go wrong

Google requires the name to be the name your business actually goes by in the real world. It specifically prohibits adding things that are not part of that name, and the list includes location information and service descriptions. So:

• "Jane Smith Real Estate San Diego" will get flagged. The city is location information and it is not part of your name.
• "Jane Smith" is safe.
• "Brokerage Name: Jane Smith" is the form Google's own guidelines use for a practitioner under a brand.
• "Jane Smith, Realtor" is a grey area. "Realtor" arguably reads as service information, which is on the prohibited list, and we could not find a documented ruling either way. If you use it, know that it may be edited.

Worth knowing: NAR's preferred form is REALTOR with the registered symbol, in capitals. Google prohibits both fully capitalised words and registered signs in the name field. You cannot satisfy both literally, so do not spend time trying.

California adds a second reason to keep it simple. Using any name other than your own legal name engages the Department of Real Estate's rules on fictitious business names, which means a county filing, and a name that includes your own name as a salesperson has to contain "team", "associates" or "group". Your plain legal name avoids all of that. It is one of the rare cases where the compliant answer and the easy answer are the same. Check the current requirements with your broker rather than taking this as legal advice.

Your address, and how to keep your home address private

Base the profile where you actually work. For most solo agents that is home, and Google has a setting for exactly this situation: a service area business. You give Google the address so it can verify you exist, then you designate the areas you serve and the address is not displayed publicly.

• Set your service areas to the places you genuinely work. Google caps a service area at roughly two hours of driving time, and an area far larger than your real one is a suspension risk rather than a shortcut.
• Do not overlap service areas across more than one profile you control. That is a documented suspension reason.
• Using your brokerage's office address is common and is not against the rules by itself, but practitioners who work on local search advise against it when many agents sit at the same address. Treat that as experienced advice rather than stated Google policy, because we could not verify it in Google's own documentation.

Your category

Pick "Real estate agent" as your primary category, not "Real estate agency", which describes a firm. Your primary category is the single highest weighted thing in local ranking according to every practitioner survey on the subject, so it is worth getting right and not worth changing casually afterwards. You can add secondary categories for anything else you genuinely do.

Have these ready before you start, not after

If Google questions your profile, it asks for evidence and in some cases gives you a short window to upload it, reported as around an hour. Gathering documents under that clock is unpleasant. Put them in one folder now:

• Your real estate licence.
• Something tying you to the address you gave, such as a utility bill or a lease.
• A business licence or tax registration if you have one.
• Anything showing your name used publicly as a business: signage, a business card, your website, your brokerage's agent page.

Verification

Google decides how you verify, and for a service area business it usually means video. You record an unedited live video on your phone, in one take, generally at least thirty seconds, showing the things Google asks for on screen at the time: typically your location, evidence you operate the business, and proof you have access to your tools or records. You cannot upload something you filmed earlier and edited.

• Review takes up to about five business days.
• The usual reasons a video is rejected are that it was edited, that it did not show what was asked, or that it did not connect you to the address.
• If you are rejected, you can appeal. Reinstatement commonly takes about a week and sometimes five or six.

What to fill in first once you are verified

In order of what the evidence supports, rather than in the order Google's interface presents it:

1. Primary category. Already covered, and the most important field on the profile.
2. Hours, honestly. Buyers and sellers search evenings and weekends, and whether a business is open at the moment of the search is a ranking factor. Agents who list nine to five office hours are invisible at the exact moment somebody is looking.
3. Services. Fill these in properly. Google retired the questions and answers feature in late 2025, which leaves services, your description and your photos as the text on the profile you actually control.
4. Reviews. The strongest lever you have, and the one with a clear target: consumers want to see reviews from the last three months, a rating at or above four and a half, and at least twenty of them. Ask every client, ask the same way every time, and reply to all of them within a day. Do not offer anything in exchange for a review and do not ask only the clients you expect to be happy. Both are against Google's policy and the FTC's review rule.
5. Photos. Yours, not stock.

One thing not to bother with as a ranking play: posting. Posts are worth doing for freshness and because a seller reading your profile sees activity, and RealQube drafts one for you every week. But the only controlled test of posts and ranking found no effect, and posts do not appear anywhere in Google's own guidance on improving local ranking. We would rather tell you that than sell you a feature on a claim we cannot support.

Then come back and connect it

Once you are verified, open Google Business in the dashboard and press Connect Google. From then on RealQube drafts your weekly post and a reply to every new review for your approval, and pulls your profile's performance into your reports. See connecting your Google Business Profile.

A note on how current this is

Google changes this process and the wording of its screens regularly, which is why this article describes the rules and the decisions rather than naming buttons. Start at business.google.com and follow what is actually on screen. Where what you see disagrees with what is written here, Google is right and we are out of date, and we would like to know: email realqubeseo@gmail.com and we will fix it.