How to Use Google My Business Posts to Promote Your Local Company

posted on 2/13/2018

If your small business has a verified Google My Business listing (and it should), you now have a new tool to reach potential local customers with fresh, relevant content about your business. Google Posts, once only available to a small group of organizations, are now available to all small businesses using Google My Business.

With Google Posts, anyone authorized to manage your Google My Business listing can create short, social media-like updates right from the Google My Business dashboard to tell people about daily specials, current offers, new products, company news, or upcoming events at your location.

Once created, Google Posts will immediately display in both Google search and maps results on both desktop and mobile. Content from Google Posts may also appear in the information box that appears to the right of search results, called the Knowledge Panel.

Posts can be up to 300 words long, and can include an image, video, GIF, or an event including date and time. You can also add a call to action—the choices are Learn more, Reserve, Sign up, Buy or Get offer.

Google Posts shows you how many times your post was seen, and how many times a customer clicked your CTA button. For more detailed analytics, be sure to create a tracking URL for your CTA button so you can track clickthroughs and conversions on your site.  

Posts will remain visible for seven days, after which they will expire and be removed by Google. Event posts expire after the event has taken place.

While Google has not indicated whether Google Posts will improve search rankings, they can be used to encourage organic traffic to your website, which should improve your position on the search engine results page (SERP).

For more information, see Google’s How Posts Work page and its instructions on Posting on Google.