There’s a feature that Google released to enhance the Google Business settings that gives you the opportunity to add a short news post to the business profile box that often appears when a query that includes your business name is entered.
Like this:
When you are adding the post you get composing box like the following.
You can use it to promote an event, special offer, blog post, news or idea about your business.
Each post can have:
- 100-300 words
- an image
- a button linking to a web page
The linking button can be called either of:
- Learn more
- Reserve
- Sign up
- Buy
- Get offer
If you toggle the option for event you can also add:
- event title
- start date
- start time
- end date
- end time
You are no doubt familiar with the information box on the right side, it comes up for lots of search queries.
When people search for a business on Google, they may see information about that business in a box that appears to the right of their search results. The information in the box, called the Knowledge Panel, can help customers discover and contact your business. Google Knowledge Panel.
The Google Business Posts is an additional option to publish onto the Knowledge Box.
Accessing Google Business
Either login to https://business.google.com or there might be an editing box on the top of the search results if you are logged in like below.
If you don’t have access to the Google Business section and you are a Jezweb client get in touch and we can help you with access to the maps listings. We often try and claim the maps listings as we finish the setup of client websites but sometimes we will need to do a phone call or mail validation to sort it out.
Adding a Post to Google Business
Once you’ve logged in find the button for Posts on the left side menu and click in the top area where it says write your post.
Then the popup for adding a post should be visible.
Adding an image to your post
Clicking on the camera icon for make your post stand out with a photo I would consider compulsory for visual interest.
You then upload the image and crop it to a squarish shape to suit the post requirements. It’s best to upload a reasonably large image, say over 1000 pixels wide so that it looks good at a range of sizes.
Adding text and a link to the post
Once the image is added you can put the text in of 100 – 300 words and toggle the Add a button so you can paste in a web link.
Previewing the Google Business Post
Then preview the results and publish once you are happy with it.
For desktop search the end result will be something like this
On a mobile the posts are quite prominent and show just under the info box.
You can see that once you have multiple posts it creates a kind of carousel.
If you only have one post up then it shows as a single line across the screen of the phone something like this.
Given the button choices available it would seem Google’s assumption is that the Google Business Posts will be often used to promote deals, sales, specials, news or ideas.
Promoting a product range with a buy link
Here’s an example of a buy link setup for Wine Design.
Promoting a Special or Featured Product
You could use the Google Business posts to promote a special or featured product like this with the buy link like Personalised Keepsakes has.
Google Business Posts is Great!
We really like this feature. It may seem small and kind of insignificant but I don’t think it is just because we are web geeks that we are excited about it. People are accessing our Google Business listing every day and we see the visitor stats for some of our clients accounts and it is definitely becoming more popular to use the call now and directions function.
Example of stats available in the Google Business dashboard
As a quick example here are a few of the stats from the Jezweb Google Business dashboard.
Jezweb is not a destination kind of business so I wouldn’t expect these stats to be anywhere near as high as they would for a retail store or popular location but even still there is someone using the Google Business links to call us or get directions to our office or visit our website each day.
Below is an example of the Google Business stats for a client where they are a destination that their clients need to drive to so you can see the dramatic difference in usage compared to ours over the same time period.
We’re planning on publishing learn more links for the clients that we write blogs for as part of their seo and we’d be happy to show you how you can login and add news items to the Google Business Posts feature yourself if you are interested.