Google My Business Guide
Google Posts
Google Posts in Your GMB Profile
The Google Posts feature allows you to engage with searchers directly in search engine results pages (SERP) and on Maps. You can create compelling content, share images, events, offers, and various different calls-to-action.
Types – There are 3 post types to choose from:
1. What’s New:
These are the posts that share more general happenings or updates. They could be specific about your business, a new blog post, topic specific, or even showcase a customer review or testimonial.
2. Events
Promote an event you are hosting, involved in, or supporting. All events require a title, start & end dates, and time. Add a description and details too.
3. Offers
If you are having any promotions, sales, or coupons, you can use this post type to showcase them. Like events, offers also require titles, start & end dates, and time-frame. The “View offer” CTA is automatically added.
Text
Each post can have up to 1,500 words (that’s a blog post :), however; only approximately the first 16-20 words (around 75-100 characters give or take on desktop – less on mobile) show up in your Knowledge Panel results. So make the first few sentences count.
Timeframe
Posts expire in 7 days. Unless you set up your post as an “Event” in which case the post expires on the event end date.
Image
Every post needs an accompanying image (unless you use a video). The image edit used to have forced ratios and cropping was a bit of a pain, Google seems to have remedied this now. Before we found that you had to play around with the dimensions of the images you wanted to use. One previously recommended image size was 1,076px by 815px. Our recommendation is to always test the image, check the preview, and expect that if there is an optimal size that it is likely to change frequently.
Number of Posts
You can have up to 10 live posts at once. They are published in a scrolling carousel.
Video
For some posts you may prefer to use a video instead of an image. With videos you get the added bonus of having additional content that won’t fit in the description section.
Call-to-action
CTA’s on desktop appear as blue buttons and on mobile and in the Maps app as text links. You can add a CTA on every single post type and your options range from:
- Book
- Order online
- Buy
- Sign up
- Get offer
- Learn More
- Call (uses listing’s Primary Number)
Tip: Don’t forget to add UTM parameters when you add your link to your post.
The Posts feature can act like a micro-blog for business owners to showcase their latest content, encourage appointments and bookings, highlight specials, events, and more. This feature offers a unique opportunity to get searchers to your website in a time where Google is trying to be front and center for in-SERP interactions. This is one GMB feature that you should definitely be using weekly to enhance your branded Knowledge Panel and increase conversions. Published Posts show up on mobile and desktop search results in the KP, and sometimes in Maps. Learn everything you need to know about Posts and start taking advantage of this awesome feature.
Google Posts are incredibly powerful and should be part of your GMB and local Ottawa strategy. There are clients that have seen incremental gains in traffic and conversions (appointments booked) since using and implementing this feature. Other marketers are also seeing gains for their clients by utilizing Posts, it would be silly not to take advantage of this feature.