Local SEO

How to Get the Most out of Your Google Post

Posting on Google is a great way to share relevant, fresh content with the people who are searching for you. It enables businesses to engage with users directly on their knowledge graph, sharing what’s new, special offers, or upcoming events. The feature is not yet available for hotels, but can be used by restaurants, spas, associations, and service-oriented businesses.

Google shares insights via the dashboard on how many views and how much engagement your post receives, but it’s a good idea to add UTM tracking to your URLs to get a more accurate reading of the engagement.

If you have multiple posts, the newest ones will be displayed first (the last post you made in the dashboard). There’s no way to reorder a post once they’ve been created, and it will expire after 7 days—unless it’s an offer that has an end date. Expired posts will still be visible in your GMB dashboard view.

The What’s New option allows you to write up to 300 words, but make sure that the first 80–100 characters grab the reader’s attention—those are the characters that get displayed before getting cut off. Unless you have more than one post, in which case your preview character space is even smaller (50–80 characters).

Next, select the call to action that leads people to your site. There are a lot of options to choose from such as Learn More, which is great for news articles, promoting a blog post, or informing searchers of seasonal business re-openings.

Other CTA options include Book, Order Online, Buy, Sign Up, and Get Offer. Get Offer gives you the option to add expiry dates and terms and conditions, if necessary.

After you’ve decided on your attention-grabbing post topic, it’s time to add a photo, video or GIF. The best size to use is 750x750 for photos, 100mb or smaller for video.

Want to post an event? Easy! An event post lets you add a title—which is bolded in search—and a start and end date/time. Keep it concise—you only get 29 characters to catch the reader’s eye if you have more than one post added to your knowledge panel.

The final post option is Offer. It lets you add all the same content, but you get 300 words to talk about your offer. You’ll need a start and end date and time, and can even add a coupon code, terms and conditions, and a link to your site.

And there you go! It’s just that easy to make the most of the knowledge graph to promote, share, and inform users of the best your business has to offer.

VERB Interactive is a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.