Even for the savviest local businesses that have optimised their profiles in full, there’s one element of Google My Business that is often overlooked: Google Posts. By using Google Posts, you can keep your audience up to date with your business while improving your visibility at the same time.
What are Google Posts?
If you’ve ever made a post on a social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter, you’ll have a general idea about what Google Posts entails. These posts are relatively short snippets of content, and they can be used to share information about your business.
As for what you can post about, here are a few examples:
- Advertise your latest products or services.
- Updates about your business.
- Offers such as discount codes or even competitions.
- Give customers a behind-the-scenes insight into the business.
- Glowing testimonials from previous customers.
- Promote an upcoming event.
In general, you can write about pretty much whatever you want with these posts – within reason, of course. Google points out that you have to keep GMB posts family-friendly, which means avoiding any explicit or sexually suggestive content.
When a user performs a relevant local search, your posts have the possibility of showing up in both Google results and Google Maps. This is why plenty of online marketing experts consider GMB posts SEO-friendly. It is said that a regular posting schedule can result in improved search rankings and organic traffic for local SEO campaigns.
How to create a GMB post
In the same way that setting up a Google My Business profile is easy on the surface, the same also applies to creating posts.
To begin with, login to your GMB account. Look at the menu and click the “Posts” button. You will then be presented with options for creating your post. Select the most appropriate one for the purpose of your content.
From here, you can start putting together your post. Keep in mind the word limit. Each post requires a minimum of 100 words, but it’s also only allowed 300 words in total. If this isn’t enough to convey your message, you have the choice to add videos or photos to your post.
If you do upload an image, it must follow these size requirements:
- Minimum: 10KB size limit, 400 x 300 pixels
- Maximum: 25MB size limit, 10000 x 10000 pixels
Regular posts vs. Event posts
There are two main post options to choose from: regular posts and event posts.
If you go for a regular post, note that these expire after seven days. With this in mind, you should attempt to produce a new post every week – this way, your Google My Business account will appear constantly up to date. Regular posts are suitable for status updates, announcements and news about your business.
Event posts operate slightly differently. Rather than being restricted to a seven-day limit, these posts stick around until the event is finished. So, if you make an event post that is for an event three months from now, it will remain part of your GMB account for that full three months. This is suitable for generating interest for your event over an extended period of time.
Regardless of which post type you select, they’re both helpful for your local marketing campaign. Aside from pushing online traffic towards your business website, GMB posts are indexed and may appear in search results.
Tips and tricks
Making posts on Google My Business is a good start. Yet you want to take the time to optimise them for maximum effect. To do this, take into account the following tips:
Produce high-quality posts
It’s an obvious point, yes, but it’s important that your posts are quality creations. This means they need to avoid misspellings and unnecessary fluff and must be compelling for users to consume in full.
For those not confident in their writing ability, you can utilise our GMB posting service. Our team of content specialists will be able to deliver engaging, professional Google Posts to delight your target audience.
Stick to a regular schedule
If you run a blog as part of your marketing efforts, you’ll know the importance of sticking to a regular posting schedule. This logic applies to GMB posts. At the very least, you should aim for one post every week.
Use the GMB post scheduler
Did you know you can schedule GMB posts? This is a useful feature offered by Google, which allows you to create posts, save them as drafts, and schedule them for release at a later date. This is particularly helpful when combined with the previous point about posting on a regular basis. If you get a spare hour, you could create content for an entire month and then not have to worry about making weekly posts.
Include a call to action
The intention of your posts should ultimately be to drive users to your website. This mission can be supported by utilising an effective call to action, something like ‘Read more’ or ‘Buy now’. Plus, even if it doesn’t convince them to click, your site still benefits from the backlinks.
If you still feel like you require assistance, get in touch with us today. Our experts can put together a local managed SEO campaign, which incorporates all elements of Google My Business – and local SEO on the whole. This campaign will ensure you stand out from your competitors and hit the heights with local search!
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- https://www.clickintelligence.co.uk/what-can-we-expect-from-local-seo-in-2017/
- https://www.clickintelligence.co.uk/local-citations-explained-nap/
- https://www.clickintelligence.co.uk/will-my-hosting-ip-affect-local-seo/
- https://www.clickintelligence.co.uk/local-listings-and-seo/
- https://www.clickintelligence.co.uk/how-to-manage-local-search-as-an-enterprise/
- https://www.clickintelligence.co.uk/local-seo-strategy-for-multiple-locations/
