Managed Google Business Profile for mortgage brokers

Most brokers set up a Google Business Profile once, tidy it for an afternoon and never touch it again. It then sits there for years, quietly representing the firm to everyone searching for a mortgage adviser nearby, with an old phone number and a description written before the business changed.

Managing it properly is not a project. It is a small recurring routine with a named owner, and this is about how to run that routine — particularly when an agency, a software supplier or several advisers are involved.

Decide who owns it, and hold the keys

The single most common problem in this area is access. A former marketing agency still owns the listing, a member of staff who left is the only manager, or nobody can remember which email address the account uses.

The firm should own the profile at the highest level of access and grant others below it. If an agency manages it, they get a manager role, not ownership, and that role is removed when the relationship ends. Keep a note of who currently has access and check it twice a year.

Where more than one office or adviser has a presence, decide centrally how names, categories and descriptions are written so that the firm does not present three different versions of itself.

The monthly routine

A useful cadence takes about twenty minutes.

• Check the core details still match reality: name, phone, hours, website, service areas, appointment link.
• Read any edits Google or the public has suggested and correct anything wrong.
• Look at new reviews and respond to them.
• Check the questions section for anything unanswered or misleading.
• Post one short, useful update.
• Note the month's actions and calls in a simple log.

Doing that consistently beats a large overhaul once a year, because the profile is judged on being current more than on being polished.

Reviews as a managed process, not a favour

Ask genuine clients at a natural moment — after an offer or on completion — using neutral wording that does not steer them towards a rating. Never offer anything in exchange, and never ask only the clients you expect to be positive.

Reply to everything, briefly. The reply is read by future clients rather than by the reviewer.

The compliance point matters here and is easy to get wrong: never confirm in a public reply that someone is a client, never reference their circumstances, their lender or their case, and never correct their account of events with detail from the file. If a review is unfair, reply with a neutral offer to discuss it offline and take the conversation into your complaints process where appropriate.

Posts and descriptions that stay on the right side

Anything you publish about your regulated services is a promotion. Descriptions, service lists and posts should be accurate about what the firm does and what it can access, fair, clear and not misleading.

Be careful with rate figures, claims about lender access, statements about approval likelihood and anything implying an outcome. If you are an appointed representative, check what your network requires you to include and whether promotional content needs sign-off before publication. Build that approval step into the routine rather than treating it as an obstacle.

Keep a copy of what was published and when. A promotion that only exists on a platform you do not control is hard to evidence later.

Set the service area honestly

Serve the areas you actually serve. Listing towns you have never worked in to widen visibility produces enquiries you cannot help, wastes your team's time and gives a poor impression to the person who called.

If advisers work remotely and meet clients by video, say so. It is a real service model and describing it accurately performs better than pretending to a high-street presence you do not have.

Measure actions, not impressions

Profile views are close to meaningless. What you want to know is whether local visibility produces conversations worth having.

Track calls, website clicks, direction requests and messages, then connect them to what happened afterwards. Ask new enquirers how they found you and record the answer in your CRM, because the platform's own attribution will never tell you which of those calls became a case.

Compare the pattern month to month rather than obsessing over a single week, and expect seasonality.

Working with an agency or supplier

If someone manages this for you, agree three things in writing: what they will do each month, what they may publish without approval, and what they will report. Ask for evidence of the actions taken rather than a dashboard of impressions.

Retain the ability to change or remove anything published in your name at short notice. It is your regulated business attached to it, regardless of who typed it.

Where it fits

A well-run profile works alongside the rest of your local presence: pages on your own site that answer real questions, accurate directory listings, and a team that answers the phone quickly. On its own it produces clicks. Combined with those things it produces clients.