4 Things to Know About Google Posts

Any interaction your clients have with customers across digital spaces can have great value. So, each tool that boosts your clients’ brands to their user bases is a win-win. Google Posts are a great way to reach out to customers, promote events, and provide an up-to-the-minute feed covering what’s most relevant to your clients’ business. Learn you can do with Google Posts and the four post types you can include on Google Business Profiles.

Get to know the 4 Google Post types

By making a post, you are effectively creating a micro-blog that will appear on the Google Business Profiles (GBP), appearing across your brand clients’ locations. With this Google integrated feature, you can create posts that fall into 1 of 4 categories listed below:

1. What’s New

“What’s New” category posts are for general information about the location, promoting new or seasonal products or services. What’s New posts are a great way keep customers informed about a location hours or update on day-to-day happenings. These posts can and should include a photo or video and a call-to-action button. Creating relevant content at a location level can greatly improve the organic visibility.

2. Events

“Event” category posts allow you to promote different events as they happen at any of your brand clients’ locations. To create an Event post, you must include a start and end date, as well as times. “Events” are a great way to show a business’s involvement in their community and promote events that can draw larger groups people to your clients’ locations. After all, more people in the door often means more exposure and sales for a location.

3. Offers

“Offers” category posts are all about the sales happening at your clients’ locations. Just like events, Offers posts require start and end date with times—which is important when notifying customers exactly when they can participate in upcoming sales events. In this post you can also provide a Coupon link or redemption link for customers to use in-store or online on your clients’ website. The competition in retail verticals can be tough, but having a sale promoted on your clients’ listings can help convert customers that are on the fence.

4. Health and Safety

“Health and Safety” was brought into Google Posts in early 2020 to help business communicate with their community on the latest COVID-19 rules implemented by local governments around the world. Health and Safety posts can be used to communicate the following to customers:

• Hours of operation and temporary closures due to lockdowns/curfews.
• Changes business operations, letting customers know; take-out, delivery, curbside pick-up options or letting customers know to call ahead.
• Updates to how the location manages safety and hygiene. This can be vaccination requires, masking, and/or cleaning of facilities.
• Requests for support. If a customer is going to need special support to access the facility (example: seniors grocery shopping before the rest of the public).

Know each Google Post type’s time limits

Google Posts are meant to be timely, informative micro-blogs that help customers understand more about a business. With this comes time limits on the posts with each of the 4 Google Post types:

What’s New and Health and Safety

Both “What’s New” and “Health and Safety” post types will disappear off a GBP after 7 days. Google does this as these are meant to be your most current updates for keeping people informed about your business. These posts are then archived in the GBP for each location. When a user clicks to see more posts, the old post will also appear for users to view.

Events and Offers

As you now know, “Events” and “Offers” post types both require date ranges. Events and Offers posts remain live following the schedule you predetermined for these posts. After the Event or Offer is finished, the post is archived with other old posts.

How to make the most of Google Posts

Tailor Calls to Action to continue the conversation

Google Posts by their nature are meant to generate conversions. Aside from Offers posts, each post will have the option to include a Call to Action (CTA) button. These CTAs allow users to convert in one of six different ways. The six CTAs include:

• Book
• Buy
• Order Online
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Call Now

As you can see, you will have a variety of different conversions you can make via a Post. You have several options to keep users engaged based on specific promotions and business category your client is in.

Google Posts offer opportunity for SEO benefits

Google Posts are designed to highlight important and relevant information about a client’s business, which makes them a perfect place to include well-crafted content with a potential to boost rankings for their profile pages. When users type in search queries to Google Maps, whether short or long tail, Google will reference the content written in Google Posts to judge the relevance a business has in search. As people search for their specific needs, if your clients may have related posts to their queries, those clients’ listings may have a leg up in relevance. Plus, there is a potential to being called out in a snippet or improve rankings in the Maps channel.

Learn more about Google Posts

The more relevant content you create for your clients’ businesses, the better chance they have to boost their rankings. Now that you know more about the Google Post types at your disposal, do you know how to craft that perfect post? Download our guide, The Ultimate Guide to Google Posts, on how to leverage this feature and have it perform for your clients’ businesses.

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