Google has released several local features in recent years to help local business to promote themselves. Google Posts is one of those features – but what is it? How do you set them up? And what do you use them for in Google Search?
After extensively using and testing this feature on our own Google My Business post listing, today we are going to talk about setting up Google Posts, and how you should use them to drive clicks to your website with calls to action.
What are Google Posts?
Found within your Google My Business account, posts are like small cards that will appear on your local business listing that you can use to post updates and other such information. These will be displayed directly on Google Search engine.
This kind of feature makes updating customers and new business with current special offers and activities a breeze. When they appear in your GMB listing and knowledge panel, they increase the chance of someone engaging with your business and clicking through to your website.
You can post as many cards as you like, however only 10 will be scrollable/visible from your business listing until a user would have to click through to your posts page – and only 1 and a half of your cards a viewable at a glance on your Google business listing.
How to use them
The only prerequisite to using Google Posts is to own a Google My Business post here. Once you have a location verified, you’ll be able to add and edit all sorts of features, but the one we’re interested in is the posts tab on the left. This is where we can add updates for our listing.
There’s no limit to what you can post but to name but a few: any events, urgent updates, promotions, products, discounts, or case studies of your work. Using the posts tab, you can find pre-created anchor text for buttons, the text box and the accompanying image you wish to add.
Requirements for your post are as follows:
- Images must be a maximum of 814px by 610px
- File size must be no more than 100mb
- Up to 1,500 characters of text description
Once published, your posts will be active for 7 days before expiring (but will still be visible in your posts section).
Benefits of using Posts
One upside to using posts is that your business listing gets added visibility in local search results, if you add your business keywords to posts then can increase your map pack rank so more people can find your business.
It’s also your opportunity to promote offers so if you’re pushing any promotions that are on for a limited time (for example Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals) then posts is a great way to do this.
Drive traffic to specific pages within your website by highlighting new content on your website or new services your business might’ve added.
Their versatility means you could use them for many uses. Next, we’re going to cover some of the main types of posts you can use.
Different types of posts
As shown in the image above, there are 4 core types to label your posts as (each adds their own custom features to your posts).
What’s New lets you write a short update about your business and attach an image to help you better update people. In reality, you can write whatever you want in here as it doesn’t say it’s “what’s new” on the users’ side – it just shows as an unlabelled post.
Event is a post type reserved for events of course. You can add times and dates and describe what will occur at the event. This is crucial to an events company marketing strategy.
Offer is your discount code post type where you can highlight a sale.
Product gives you added markup for your prices and product descriptions to help you better sell a primary product or a service (this doesn’t have to be a tangible good).
If you’re struggling to think up a post idea then Google offers a sample page to show you some relevant posts in your area such as there:
Measuring engagement
In Digital Marketing, and when using such marketing tools, it’s important to be able to track and monitor how our efforts are impacting. One feature that helps us do this is the insights tab within the business listing. Here we can get a range of metrics about the whole business listing’s performance, however, you won’t find the performance of your posts here as this is kept directly below your published posts here:
This shows us how many impressions our post has had and also the user clicks.
Google Business listings are still underused by both businesses and searchers, though they are up and coming so the power of such posts will only grow in time. Therefore, for now, these metrics are mostly unimportant but do help attribute some web traffic to your posts.
Using Google Posts has been proven to have a positive effect on our content marketing strategy, and it’s not much-added effort to incorporate. The benefits for SEO and visibility are a quick, easy and free way to promote your business.
Learn more about digital marketing and SEO with our Digital Marketing Glossary
