Optimize Your GMB Posts

To optimize your GMB posts is an easy task a business should complete to add value to their business. Google My Business Posts are mainly used to help local businesses connect with customers in their area. Businesses use these posts to display relevant information about the business, their products, special announcements and offers directly on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). If a user searches for your business directly, the active posts will be displayed in the same area as your GMB listing’s contact and location information.

Most posts stay active for 7 days unless the business takes it down before that. Event Posts will stay active for the duration of the event dates. The Posts feature is completely FREE and easy to manage so make sure you utilize this feature to help grow your business.

There are several factors that can effect your success of using GMB posts. Below we are going to cover some we find important. For more information on the basics of GMB posts check out our blog.

Using the Right Images

Images are a great way to attract more attention to your posts. You want to make sure the images you’re using are both relevant and captivating. The best size to use is 750 x 750 px. You are able to use as small as 250 x 250 px but if aything smaller than that the image wont be accepted.

Make your images captivating and grab your viewers attention.

If your image is being used to promote a product or special such as food you want to use a more closer focused, crystal clear image. Also make sure the image subject is weighted to the center in case of any cutoffs.

Headlines and Titles

Your headline is the most important element to optimize your GMB posts. It is the first thing that your viewer sees when looking at your post so it needs to be bold and enticing. The headline has to make your viewer want to click on the post eager to read on.

Your headline needs to show your reader what you are offering and why people should care. This is relevant because all headlines and titles are competing for placement on the SERPs. Your character amount for your headline is limited so make sure your headline is concise.

Headlines are not easy to come up with. A good technique is to try to come up with 20 different titles for a specific post and pick which one stands out the most. Again, make sure that headline is an attention grabber.

Example of a GMB post’s Headline and Description.

Descriptions and Details

Like the headline, you want to ensure your descriptions are clear and concise. Your description in total should be at least 150- 300 characters long but you need to convey the important information within the first 80. In the thumbnail view of the post is where your description will be cutoff. Finally, make sure your descriptions are SEO conscious.

Call- To- Action

A Call- To- Action (CTA) is a line of text or a button that tells the viewer to do something in order to continue reading or explore the site further. They can be used to drive the viewer to a conversion page where they can contact you directly, buy a product, request a quote or anything else you want them to do. It is also a tool to increase your site’s click through rate. Your goal is for your viewers to spend more time exploring your site as this will increase your SEO presence and overall help the visibility of your site.

It is best to be clear and concise here as well. You want to avoid commercial slang or any kind of promotional slang and be direct with your viewer. This can avoid confusion and keep your potential customer engaged in what your business offers.

“Learn More” Call-To-Action example.

Click Tracking

Your CTA button’s URL is what Google Analytics uses to get information about the viewer who visited your post. With this information you can adjust your approach to optimize your GMB posts. This all happens on the back-end of your GMB post. Google posts do not directly integrate with Google Analytics so it is difficult to log information deeper than views and clicks.

Using Google Analytics to manage and review data on your sites.

Using UTM codes you can better analyze and see which post campaigns have been more successful than other creating trends for you to see and capitalize on.

Google’s Campaign URL Builder is your first step in click tracking.

With this information set up your more capable of seeing who clicked on your site and which of them actually converted on your site.

Scheduling

Consistently posting relevant information is important to your success using GMB posts. It is best practice to build a plan for the type of content you are posting and how often.

As mentioned above, event posts will stay active for the duration of the event. But other post types like product promotion or offer posts only stay active for 7 days so its important to make sure your creating new posts and continuing to keep something displayed on your GMB listing.

Using scheduling is a good way to ensure your posts continue and can set up when they get posted. There are a few third party tools that you can use to schedule your posts for your GMB.

OneUp is a scheduling software that can be used in Google My Business as well as the primary social media platforms. Though it isn’t free, it is a great tool to keep posts scheduled and consistent.

OneUp allows you to schedule your GMB posts and share them on social media platforms.

Conclusion

Overall these elements are all important to writing and optimizing your GMB posts. The major aspect of this formula being SEO- friendly writing that will assist your business listing placement.

Trial and error is a major aspect of success so be sure you have your Google Analytics properly set up and are using the information to rate your post engagement. For more on how to optimize your GMB posts or other features accessible check out, Why Posting on Google My Business is Important from S & S Consultants.

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Types of GMB Posts and Features

What Types of Posts are Available?

Many businesses are still missing out on a great feature within their Google My Business (GMB) listings. There are several types of GMB posts and each offer their own features. Posting on your GMB listing has many benefits and can help build your business and gain more customers and clients.

There are 5 different types of posts and we are going through each of them and explaining their many benefits and uses. The 5 types of posts are:

• Whats New Posts
• Event Posts
• Offer Posts
• Welcome Offer Posts
• Product Posts

Whats New Posts

With a Whats New post you can showcase any new business updates, new team members, blog posts, any reviews or testimonials and anything else happening at your business. All of these updates can help bring attention to your business they are huge in building trust with your customers and clients.

A Whats New post is allotted up to 1500 characters when writing your posts. It also offers opportunity to utilize images or videos. Both images and videos are extremely important when creating posts. Your posts are more likely to grab a viewers attention and keep them on your listing when they see an image or video. Suggested size of your images or videos is 1200 x 900 px and max file size of a video is 100 MB.

A Call to Action (CTA), is a line of text or image that prompts your visitors to click and perform a specific action. A Whats New post offers several CTA opportunities for your listing including:

• Book
• Learn More
• Order Online
• Buy
• Sign Up
• Call Now (use the primary number of your GMB listing)
• Add a Button Optional (If you don’t want to add a link)

New posts will stay active for 7 days and will be displayed above any existing posts that have yet to expire. After 7 days your posts do not disappear. Instead they show up under post navigation on mobile searches and under the “View All” if on a desktop.

In the Knowledge Panel of the listing your visitors can find a thumbnail preview of the post before clicking to see the entire post. There are a limited number of characters available for thumbnail text and this could be cut by using a CTA such as “Learn More.”

Events Posts

Event posts are one of the most effective types of GMB posts. If your business is involved in, attending, supporting or hosting an event you can promote that event using an event post. It could be any sort of worthy event whether it is in store, a charity, or part of your local neighborhood.

In your event post you can use up to 58 characters to create a title. If you use all 58 characters allotted your title will be cut off in the thumbnail view of the post. When your title or CTA in the thumbnail get cut off you will see a “. . .” displaying the cut off. The thumbnail can be effected by CTA buttons, text and dates.

Like the What’s New post, Event posts can also use images and video. The same dimension recommendations and video sizes apply. If you use the built in photo editor make sure your optimizing the dimensions of the image or video otherwise the editor will display an unsightly black background behind the upload.

Example of a GMB Event post.

Event title also work like What’s New titles and allow 58 characters. When writing the body or description your allotted 1500 characters. Some businesses like to create short and sweet posts while some like to use the full available space.

Schedueling Event dates

Using Start/End dates you can select the appropriate dates for the event. Though you don’t have to include an end date on your event, if you create a new post it will still take precedent over your never ending event post pushing it down on the display hierarchy. Along with dates you can add times for your events. Like dates, they have a start and an end time and can be displayed down to the minute.

Event posts also offer CTA buttons. All & CTA buttons that are available in the What’s New posts are available for event posts.  

Events in the business profile are not connected to Google Event Posts. These events come from other third party sources like Eventbrite or even your own website and marked up using Event Shema or structred data markup. You can take advantage of this by creating an event on your business website and make an event post on your GMB with exact details and link it to the schema markup on your website.

Offers Posts

Offer posts allow you to promote sales, offerings, or discounts currently offered by your business. These posts include a bright yellow tag (visible on both mobile and desktop) that are very attention grabbing.

Images and videos work just like above and are recommended to make your offer more compelling to your viewers. Your title and details sections of the post also operate the same way as previously mentioned posts. Your allotted 58 characters for your title and 1500 characters for your details section.

Coupons are an optional addition for Offers posts. Not only making your post more enticing and exclusive, coupons can help you track the exact conversions your business is getting through your GMB listing.

Example of a GMB Offer post.

Another optional feature of Offer posts is a “link to redeem offer” button. This works as your CTA of the post. This adds a URL to a landing page that provides your searchers with additional information about your offer including how they can redeem the offer. If this option is used it will be displayed as a “Redeem Online” button.

If creating an offer posting for a client its strongly recommended to add the Terms and Conditions feature. It can be as simple as “See website and contact us for rules and regulations.” You want to make sure the viewers are quickly able to be informed.

Welcome Offer Posts

Released in June 2019, Welcome Offer posts were introduced to convert followers to customers. This offer is only available to viewers who opt to follow your business on the Google Maps app. Since its only displayed on the maps app your business needs to download the app in order to create this type of post. Unlike the regular Offers post, there is no yellow tag.

The Welcome Offer posts follow the same criteria as the regular offers post for the title, details, start/end dates, images and videos and terms and conditions.

A new feature of these posts is adding a website. By adding a URL you can create a link to a landing page that includes more information on the offer and if its redeemable online. Unlike the Offer posts, there is no “Redeem Online” button.

The Welcome Offer posts are geared to new followers and viewers making them one of the more effective types of GMB posts.

Product Posts

Product posts provide the opportunity to promote and highlight specific items that your business offers or sells. These posts have their own navigation heading in mobile searches.

Example of a GMB Product post.

Instead of a post title you have a Product name. The name does work just like the title with a 58 character max. Besides that change your other options are the same. The post can stille include images or videos, descriptions and CTA options. An optional feature is the price description. You can have an exact amount, a min to max slider or opt to exclude a price of the product.

What’s the Best Post Type?

Though there are several types of GMB posts, each post type has its specific uses so one isn’t better than the other. All types have the potential to show up as Post Mentions in the local finder results. This can help your overall click through rates and turn into increased business.

Its time to utilize posts in your GMB listing. Go make your brand stand out in search results and increase engagement with your listing. Try to optimize your GMB posts with these tips by S & S Consultants.

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Win Over Your Viewers With GMB Posts

Google My Business is one of the most powerful SEO strategies a business can use to improve their local search rankings. It is also a great way to connect online with potential customers and clients. Since its beginning, Google has worked hard to provide new features to help local businesses. One of the more recent of these features is the use of posts. Below are 9 Hacks for Google My Business Posts to increase your local search rankings.

Posts on your GMB listing in the business’ Knowledge Panel. When a visitor clicks on the post it expands into a larger box to grab the users attention and increase your click through rate.

Example of a new post using GMB Posts feature.

Some tips when creating a post that will overall help your GMB listing performance:

• Keep your posts clean and concise. 80-100 word posts are whats recommended, but if you use the full 300 words keep in mind that not all of the description will be displayed.
• Make sure to keep keywords and important information towards the beginning of the paragraph. This helps with Search Engine Optimization.
• Stick to images without text in them in case the image gets cutoff.
• 750 x 750 px is the recommended size for images and cant be smaller than 250 x 250 px.
• Make sure the landing page you’re sending your customers to is relevant to the post and meets the potential customer’s expectations.

The knowledge panel of your listing takes up a lot of the page when users search for your business. Use this as an opportunity to create great, engaging posts that grab your viewer’s attention.

Your GMB post speaks directly to your viewer so make sure your message is worthwhile. Do not waste your post space with hashtags as this doesn’t help your listing’s SEO, and looks spammy to the viewer. Instead focus on good information that would be valuable to the reader.

Scheduling and Timing

Timing and scheduling are important when it comes to posting. By creating a scheduling plan you can ensure you are consistently adding content to your listing.

OneUp is a third- party scheduling tool which helps in scheduling and managing your GMB posts.

The timing is relevant for other posts like events or upcoming promotions. If for example, you’re having a Veteran’s Day sale, it would be a good idea to publish your post a week before the promotion to make sure you get plenty of attention before the promotion occurs.

Get Creative with Images

If you have a design team, get them involved on creating content for your posts. Use your teams to create an eye grabbing product image. Out wow the competition by making your contact more than just a typical camera taken image. Set up proper areas to take great images, utilize proper lighting and use image editing software if you need to.

Good example of Image sizing which covers the full post size without any empty space.

If you do not have a design team Google is there to help. Google’s Small Thanks with Google helps small businesses use reviews to create design materials you can download and use on your GMB posts and even social media.

Even though your posts aren’t active after 7 days, they will still be visible in a carousel format where viewers still see your awesome images.

Content Selection

Along with your images, your content is also important. Sometimes it is hard to come up with ideas for what types of content to post. Some quick ideas to get you started:

• Highlight one of your favorite employees and what makes them stand out.
• Mention upcoming trade shows or events your business is participating in.
• Highlight a new product or a product that has a special offer.
• Run a contest or giveaway and promote it in a post.

The possibilities are endless. The biggest component is staying relevant to your brand and building your business. Content can be awesome but if it is off the wall than it wouldn’t benefit you or your business.

Track Your Posts

Your GMB Dashboard is a good starting point to track to activity of your posts but its also a good idea to use custom URLs with Google Analytics to track deeper information and find trends between the types of posts you publish. Some types of posts or keywords could perform better than other and information like this is important in connecting with your users.

Track referral traffic data and more with Google Analytics.

Tracking your posts can help you with finding how customers search for your business, actions they’ve taken on your page, where customers view your business as well as other information like how many views you have on photos.

Conclusion

All of these factors can help your business be more successful and benefit your SEO. Be sure to create great quality content and images to really grab your viewers attention. Always take advantage of the tools that are available to you. Contact S & S Business Consultants to have us help set up on your GMB page or learn about or Google My Business 3-Pack Gurantee.

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