What Do I Post On My Google Business Profile?

Well, let’s just start with the kinds of posts you can make:

1. Covid 19 updates (so 2020, and hopefully gone by the time you read this)

2. What’s New (also called “updates”)

3. Offers

4. Products

5. Events

Those are the full range of post types and all of them except the “what’s New” type has a specific purpose. For most people, the concern is about what to write in a What’s New post and also what type of image you should use, and where you should link to.

Let’s start with something you might not know, when you create a “What’s New” post with a link, those links are seldom clicked on. Of all the post types this is the one with the lowest average click-through rate. Offers, Products, and Events are just post types that you would naturally be inclined to interact with since they lead directly to a goal.

The What’s New is really just informational and its linking options allow you to select the titles: Book, Order Online, Buy, Learn More, and Sign Up. The last option is “Call” and it automatically adds the phone number included in your profile by default, you don’t have an option to enter a different number. All of these options except “Call” require a URL to be entered so that if you really want to allow someone to buy or order something, the page you link to had better be set up to immediately handle it so that the intent of the click is met. Most of the time the link chosen on the “What’s New” post type is “Learn More” with a link to an informational page or blog post that picks up where the post left off in terms of providing information.

Since a “What’s New” post with a “Learn More” link is what most people use to keep a steady stream of posts going, let’s dig a bit deeper into them. The first thing to do is to work backward and think about what page or blog post on your website you want to drive traffic to because that’s where we are going to link. Again, even if the link isn’t clicked often the post is still highlighting the page to google and even if that has no impact today it might in the future so ultimately it might be a good idea to plan on writing posts that eventually link to every one of your pages over time to create a full set of links from your profile to the content of your website with the post content serving as an introduction to that page or post.

The Good Part…

Here is where things get interesting though beyond people reading and clicking on your posts. What’s New posts also show up as potential answers in your Q&A area as people type a question. If you have written a very wide range of posts that cover real concrete issues and contain answers to basic questions then there is a good chance that the person asking a question might get an instant answer without you having to race to reply while Google measures your response. If the person asking the questions gets his answer then the question never gets posted and it’s likely that Google is scoring that in some way if they are also scoring how quickly you answer a question that isn’t answered by Google’s attempt to find one first.

The Even Better Part…

The second place that content from a post can show up is as the final entry on the results of the map underneath your basic business information. Normally as the last line of information for your company in the map results column, you will see a circle with a check mark that indicates a match was found for the search term in your list of services for a category, it will have a title that says “Provides:” and then the title of the service will appear next to it. In the absence of a direct or close hit for an existing service, Google will show a small blue globe and a title that says “Their website mentions” followed by a phrase that is either an exact match or similar to the search term. The third most common is a small image of a blue figure in a circle indicating a quote from a review where a former customer mentions the service.

The final type, the one that comes from the contents of a post, has a spiky circular banner with an exclamation point in the center that is then followed by a snippet of your post that mentions the phrase google relates, either closely or exactly, to the search phrase.

The Best Part…

Knowing this should dramatically impact your plans for posting and here is why: If the search query is something simple like “house painting” and this is the type of query that will prompt Google to produce local results with a map then you will appear on the map pack where you normally would, based on your website ranking and your profile ranking – let’s say you come in 4th so you aren’t in the 3-pack but you are up there on the map results if the searcher decides to click over to the full map results by clicking the “More Businesses” link under the three-pack.

But let’s say that the searcher entered a keyword phrase that ALSO triggers google to produce a local SERP (search engine results page) with a map but they did it with a phrase that’s a bit of a long-tail combination like “Victorian House Painting”. Suppose this phrase does not exist as a category, and nobody added it as a specific service. In that case, Google is going to know that a Victorian House is a house and it’s in need of painting so they will produce the same map and SERP results as before but this time you have a post about the different types of houses you have painted. It says “We do it all, from ranch house painting to Cape Cod house painting, to Victorian House painting, and more”, this time you’re going to show up higher in the ranking because you hit the bullseye on the search phrase, this time you move up two or three spots. You are now at or near the top of the three-pack and you have gone from not being on page one to being on page one.

You will know this worked when you see that you have an exclamation mark showing in a circular banner under your map/three-pack results with a snippet of the post that mentioned Victorian House painting included. Okay, that’s simply an example, but the point is you wrote for a long-tail ranking increase, not for great readability for a small group of people who won’t click anyway.

So how do you leverage this?

First –  stop writing only posts that are purely top-of-funnel, informational, constant-drip, brand awareness fluff as you do on Facebook. The posts on Google Business Profile are doing triple duty – people read them (but don’t often click), they end up as Q&A answers, and they impact your map ranking with their content. 

Second – Take all your services listed on your profile and do a related keyword search on them using a tool like Ubersuggest. Get all the phrases that have a decent search volume so that each service has 4-5 different related phrases with good traffic numbers.

Third – write a post for every single service that includes the related search terms and phrases, if you end up with a ton of related phrases for one then break it into two or three separate posts. Don’t get too caught up in what people will think when they read them but make sure they make sense, don’t look “keyword stuffed”, and include information that’s of value.

Fourth – make a plan first for how to slice and dice everything to cover all your long-tail phrases and then get pictures and appropriate links to go with them. Finally, write them all and post them once per day until they are all posted. After that, you can go back to posting whatever you like secure in the knowledge that all your needed critical verbiage is in the posts waiting to bump up your map position often enough to make this worth doing.

For example – your Italian restaurant menu breaks out meat dishes, seafood, and pasta – make posts that list every single menu item for each of the groups or break them into even smaller groups. At some point someone is going to search for “ravioli near me” and you only have to write this ONCE and its effect will last forever. You can break it out by regional cuisine, or any way you like.

Fifth – for extra credit write a bunch of Q&A-style posts that can work to answer every question you regularly get so the answers are in your post history already for when people ask your business a question. This won’t impact ranking but it’s truly informative and serves the user while freeing you up from having to answer it quickly.

So to wrap it all up, look at the posts you have been writing, and see how infrequently they get right to the point of what you offer as a business, it’s common to look at your existing posts and notice they don’t contain anything in the way of long-tail keyword phrases, sometimes they don’t even include the basics. Now start writing for ranking impact as well as readability.

Don’t have time to dig all this up and put it together? GBP Pilot does! Call us today and let us tell you more about the difference between trying to do this in-house or paying a swiss-army-knife agency for basic posts versus paying the Google Business Profile experts at GBP Pilot for a full posting plan that generates increased ranking and revenue.