Written by Nassira Sennoune
TLDR: A Google Business Profile does real work for a luxury real estate brokerage in Marrakech, but not the work most local search advice assumes. It does not reach a buyer in Brussels typing a question in French; it reassures that buyer’s spouse or lawyer that the office exists. Once we saw the two jobs clearly, the effort split into two budgets, and the profile stopped being asked to do what only the website can do.
The call came from a lawyer in Geneva, not from the buyer. His client was about to wire a deposit on a villa in the Palmeraie and he wanted to confirm that the brokerage was a real office with a real address. He had found our Google Business Profile, read the reviews, and checked that the street in the photos matched the street on the deposit paperwork. The call lasted four minutes.
I work in-house on the digital side of a luxury real estate brokerage in Marrakech. Our buyers mostly live abroad, in France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Gulf, and increasingly West Africa. That call told me exactly what our local presence was for.
What the Profile Does
Almost nobody who buys from us searches “real estate agency near me”. They are not near us. What they do, late in the process, is verify. The buyer’s spouse looks up the office. The buyer’s lawyer looks up the office. A bank compliance officer looks up the office. For each of them, the profile is the proof: the address, the opening hours, the photos of the door, and reviews from previous buyers, ideally in the reader’s own language.
So the profile was rebuilt for that reader. Google’s own guidance on improving local ranking stresses complete and accurate information, and for us accuracy is a trust signal before it is a ranking signal. We photographed the entrance and the meeting room rather than the properties. We asked recent buyers for reviews and let them write in French, English or Arabic, then replied in the same language. We listed the services a foreign buyer needs to see: assistance with the notary process, help with currency transfers, viewings arranged around a flight.
What It Cannot Do
Here is the limit. A buyer in Brussels who types “un étranger peut-il acheter une maison au Maroc” will never see a Marrakech map pack. Google shows local results to people near the place, or to people who name the place. The buyer in Brussels did neither. She asked a legal question in French, and the answer to that is a page, not a pin on a map.
Moz’s local search guide is clear that proximity is a core factor in local results. For a brokerage whose buyers are 3,000 kilometres away at the moment they start looking, that single fact reorganises the whole plan. The profile cannot start the conversation. It can only confirm it.
The Split That Followed
Once the two jobs were named, the effort divided cleanly.
- The profile got a small, steady routine: a review request after every completed purchase, a reply within two days in the buyer’s language, a photo refresh each quarter, and a check that the address and hours matched the website. Perhaps two hours a month.
- The website got everything else: one page per buyer question, written in the language the question is asked in. Foreign ownership, the notary’s role, currency and repatriation, the honest comparison between a riad in the medina and a villa in the Palmeraie, distance to the airport and to the international schools. These pages are what the buyer in Brussels actually finds.
The two are linked on purpose. Every question page on the brokerage’s website points to the office page, and the profile links back to the question pages, so a lawyer who arrives through the map can read what his client already read.
Two Takeaways
First, ask who actually opens your profile and when. For us it was the verifier, late in the process, and that changed every photo and every review reply. Second, refuse to let the profile carry a job it cannot do. The buyer abroad is reached by a page in her language that answers her question, and no amount of local polish substitutes for that page.
Author Bio:
Nassira Sennoune is the SEO consultant at Originn Properties, a luxury real estate brokerage based in Marrakech, working with buyers and owners across Morocco and the Gulf. If you are buying from abroad and want the ownership, notary and currency questions answered before you see a property, the team at Originn Properties starts there.