Can you put links in Google My Business posts?

Do My Business Posts Help SEO?

Absolutely Yes! My Business posts are helping your SEO effort as they contribute to the increase of topical authority for a GMB listing and E-A -T. Here’s why Google Business posts help SEO:

• Google My Business posts are the clearest signal you can send to Google that your business is open and ready to engage customers.
  
• You can direct traffic to specific pages on your website through your Google My Business listing. This will mean a boost to your website’s rankings.
  
• Your Business listing also invites customer interaction and reviews.
  
• If you link your Google My Business posts to forms, you can collect user info. Bringing people back to the site through a blog or newsletter will level up your SEO.
  
• A Google My Business listing is designed for any mobile device, so it will maximize your mobile SEO.

Your Google My Business profile can be an excellent way to engage with customers and drive traffic.

Strategic SEO copywriting techniques are key in expanding your business’s reach on the web, even if you haven’t achieved #1 yet!

Now that you know the quick answer, we can show you so much more about how Google My Business improves local SEO.

This is a long guide, so if you want to skip ahead, here’s the Table of content:

Table of Content:

Why is GMB Important for SEO?

How do Google my business posts work?

How Often Should I Post on Google My Business?

How To Optimize GMB Posts SEO

How Can I Improve My Google Business SEO?

Do Google my business posts expire?

Where do Google my business posts appear?

Why is GMB Important for SEO?

Google My Business is the best form of local SEO you can do for a few reasons:

1. Your Google My Business listing is free to use and doesn’t require any complicated investments.
   
2. GMB posts engage customers and invite responses. The social signals are strong SEO factors.
   
3. Google My Business posts direct customers clicks (CTR) to other elements of your GMB or pages of your website. This traffic boosts your SEO scores.

   Great SEO works by cooperating with Google. Google wants to help people find the most helpful answers to their searches. Your website can be the most helpful answer to someone’s search.

Connect Your GMB Profile to Everything Else

Many people don’t consider how connected data is on the internet. Your Google My Business listing can match your website, to a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, an Instagram feed, and answers to Reddit threads.

Improving your Google My Business profile and connecting all these social media outlets increases your authority in your area. Let’s think of an example:

A real estate agent makes a Google My Business profile. He links his Google My Business listing to his website. On the website about page, he links to his LinkedIn profile. Once a week, he checks in on Reddit and answers real estate questions with a link to his website and LinkedIn profile.

Google will bring all these things together:

• The real estate agent’s expertise will be established by his credentials on LinkedIn.
  
• His website’s authority will be increased every time links appear on Reddit.
  
• The trustworthiness of his website will increase because of the links to his physical address in the Google My Business profile.
  

Connecting your Google My Business listing to these different outlets will satisfy Google’s E-A-T criteria.

How Do I Use GMB to Boost My Content and SEO?

Use GMB posts strategically to direct traffic and engage with your customers. Your Google My Business profile and listing can become part of your content publishing strategy.

Let’s show you a couple of reasons to explain why this works:

• According to case studies by Moz, only 17.5% of businesses create GMB posts on a weekly basis. 40% of businesses never use GMB posts. You have a tremendous opportunity to move up in the local pack just by posting stuff.
• The same case studies showed people click on the GMB posts almost 100% of the time. So taking the time to create a relevant and engaging post is going to bring traffic to your website. Traffic helps search engine rankings according to case studies by SEMRush.

To recap, by posting on Google My Business, you can get ahead of the competition in the local 3 pack. Less than 20% of businesses make GMB posts each week. Your posts will help you move up the local pack in the search engine.

People engage with a GMB post at a fantastic rate. Taking the time to reach out to your customers, answer questions, and respond to reviews generates all kinds of great signals to Google. Make sure you’re checking in with Google My Business each week to boost your local SEO and reach out to potential customers.

How do Google my business posts work?

A Google My Business post is an opportunity for you to reach out to potential customers via your Google My Business profile and listing. You can add any update, special offer, update, new event, or product.

These posts appear on your Google My Business profile when people perform a local search. They appear at the bottom of your business listing and people can scroll through your available posts.

Here are some ways to use the post types to improve your SEO and make more money from search results.

How to Use the GMB update posts

Every business can use the update post feature to boost their local SEO and search results. There are a few simple things to do:

1. Tell people you’re still open for business. There is a little confusion over which businesses are open, especially in places where lockdowns come and go.
   
2. Tell people where you’re open. Local search results use location proximity as one of the highest-ranking factors. So use place names and prepositions such as in, around, and near to help establish your business name in a certain location.
   
3. Create (in the case of Covid-19 for example) you can create a landing page to highlight safety.
   

Don’t try to sell people stuff on this page, just reassure them you’re open and they will be safe.

These are simple tips to follow, but they will help your Google My Business listing stay relevant during a difficult time. You could apply these same tips to any other special event such as a sporting event, conference, or festival.

Showcase Offers and Generate Leads

One of the obvious Google My Business posts for more revenue is the special offer post. Tell people what’s on sale and they will buy it. There are some cool things you could do with this type of post to get even better results for your business. Here are a few strategies:

1. Write an offer post that links to a data capture form. Let’s imagine you’re running an outdoor sporting goods store. Run an offer that gives people a 10% discount in exchange for their email address. This will result in more leads, but it will also expand the email list for future marketing. Direct clicks to your website from email are a huge local SEO ranking factor.
   
2. Creating regular Google My Business posts will move your business up in the local pack. You might not want to offer discounts all the time. Instead, discount your upsell products. Offer 50% off the extra add-on instead of the primary product. This way you can get the local SEO boost without ruining your profit margins.
   
3. Save yourself time by creating Google My Business post templates for recurring offers. If you’re lucky enough to run a Mexican restaurant, create a Taco Tuesday Template you can roll out every week or month. Make sure you update the details but keep running the post regularly to dominate the local pack search results.
   

One advertising secret is to advertise your benefits, not your price. This protects your profit margins. So try to come up with ideas for your Google My Business offer posts that showcase your products and services without giving them away.

Update Your Potential Customers

Updates don’t have to be huge. Hire a new employee? Make an update. Added new equipment? Make an update. Launch a new line of products? Make an update. Change your business hours or phone number? Make an update.

The important thing about updates is to include your location. Adding your location and using prepositions such as near, in, and around is going to get your business onto the Google Maps pages. With many people searching for local businesses using Google Maps, you’re sure to boost your site visits.

A brilliant way to form a small update is to publish a case study. Create an extended review of one of your successful services, and then publish it. Offer the case study to potential customers as a download or free resource. If it’s a good fit for your business, this kind of content can help your marketing as well because people may exchange contact information on your site.

Create Event Posts to Connect With Your Audience

Any event qualifies for this kind of post. To create events that will work for your business. The things we’ve already mentioned to boost your SEO results apply here. You can aim for getting contact information from people to send them email marketing.

One way to do this is by adding a call to action and creating a landing page for your event posts. Ticketed events, even if the price is free, are great ways to gather contact information. Consider a special sale, for example. A furniture shop could run a special event aimed at offering a 10% discount to anyone with a ticket during the event hours.

Events posts stay live during the event, which makes them a potentially long-term type of marketing. With the latest Google update, the other posts stay in your profile for years (as opposed to only 7 days before the update).

Add Product Posts to Your Google Business Profile

Highlight Your Competitive Advantage and Build Traffic

Most businesses will add some products to their Google My Business profile at some point. You can bet them by being more strategic. Focus on highlighting interesting, timely, or unique products. Here are some quick tips:

• Highlight seasonal products at the right time to drive traffic to those pages.
  
• Focus on the benefits of interesting products for your potential customers.
  
• Choose the products that make your business unique and showcase them often.

We’ve said it before, but let’s repeat a basic SEO fact: traffic boosts rankings. Every visitor to your website from a Google My Business post is going to be adding a little SEO juice to your site. Use product posts to generate traffic for pages you want to move up in the rankings.

How Often Should I Post on Google My Business?

More often than your competitors, but not so often that you spam your Google My Business listing with less helpful information. You should aim for a post at least once every seven days. Without fresh posts, your Google My Business information will go stale. Potential customers will feel as if they have walked into your shop, rung the bell for attention, and no one has answered.

With GMB Crush, you can discover how often your competitors are posting and track local ranking locally in Google.

Our tool analyzes the competition’s Google My Business profile. It will show you how many posts are active, and how many posts they have made in the past 90 days. Use this data to crush the competition by posting more often.

How To Optimize GMB Posts SEO

There are the top things to work on as major priorities:

1. Location information and signals. Your GMB posts should contain the correct location and service radius for your business. Include location signals such as “near the center of + your targeted location” to provide stronger location matching.

   👉To increase the engagement of your posts, check where most of driving direction requests are coming from and include those locations in post content.

2. Choose the right categories. Every business has a primary category and up to nine secondary categories. Check out your competitors and make sure your primary and additional categories are aligned with the top #3 spots rewarded by Google.

   👉It’s important to mention your primary and additional categories when you are creating content for Google My Business.

   👉Make sure that any geo-mentions include both the name of a location as well other places, neighborhoods or addresses in order to maximize engagement with customers who might live nearby!

3. Use keywords connected to your business. Make sure you’re staying on top of your game by checking Google search console data and pulling out the full list of keywords that are relevant to where people will potentially find what they need. Then use those findings for better copywriting efforts in order produce quality GMB post content.
4. GMB UTM link + GSC to rank higher. It’s important to use UTM links when using Google My Business’ search engine results page (SERP) as you can filter by both a UTM and don’t contain brand-name in GSC (Google search console).
   
   A local searcher with strong purchase intent is someone who wants to buy a very specific product or service. All of these correlations between queries and search results are pulled from blog articles, deeper landing pages and old GMB posts.
   
   If you’re looking for some inspiration, connect your GSC console to Google spreadsheet. You’ll be able to filter out additional queries and get a lot of insights on upcoming GMB posts in addition with content ideas!
   
   To increase your chances of ranking, avoid repeating the same GMB post topics over again. Use unique content and set each one as you would create a blog article structure: headline, intro, body.
   
   To create a successful strategy, elect one of your best-performing Google My Business posts as the “lead” and link to it six related topical support GMB posts. We’ve seen great results when linking these together in order for them both positively influence ranking!

5. Leverage Aged GMB posts. Yup! Aged Google my Business posts are picked up by the algorithm as local justification.

   🤓The GMB post algorithm is a hit-or-miss. It’s often picking up old posts that are two or three months old and using those as matches on the 3pack. There are a few things you should consider before deciding on your strategy:

   👉It’s important to keep an eye open for the type of Google My Business (GMB) posts that are triggering your ranking results and organize them into a spreadsheet.

   👉Whenever the GMB posts are getting too old, be sure to stay on track with your publishing frequency. Take a note of what type and length publishes/ uploads content for each post (head title and image), as well how often they were originally published; this will help keep everything on track.

   👉Avoid reposting the same content, from our experience all the GMB posts using duplicate or similar information are underperforming and not indexed by Google.

   👉You can reverse engineer your competitors’ rankings by checking out how they rank on the 3pack. If you notice that one of them has a local justification to their listing, then chances are good that this will work for yours too!

6. Optimize your GMB Posts for Voice searches. More and more people are using Google voice search to actually speak in questions – whole questions – as opposed to just short little search queries. Especially for mobile devices, as in the Google search bar field there’s that little microphone icon, a lot of people ( 60% of the total search volume ) are just tapping the microphone icon and then speaking their question right directly into Google search.

   👉If you have those questions and answers as GMB posts, those will get served to them. Especially if they’re in close proximity to your business when they do the search.

   👉You can optimize your GMB Posts for Voice searches by:

   
   Auditing the keyword insights list, and checking to see if any near me keywords are triggering your listing appearing.
   
   Creating a post with an H1 that prominently features one of these nearby words as well as other relevant location mentions in order to make sure you’re targeting people who would be interested in what’s going on around them.

In Addition:

1. Use calls to action in your posts to drive direct conversions. Google sees clicks and behavioral signals as a positive thing. When people visit your site from a post, you win directly through the possibility of a sale and indirectly through the boost to your SEO.
2. Add your own questions and answers to the Q&A section of the knowledge panel. This may help your customers with authoritative information from the business owner. It’s also a great way to feed super-relevant content into your business account for Google to see.
3. Liven up your knowledge panel and content with photos and videos. Multimedia content is much more memorable than plain text. For example, a short 20-second intro video for your new staff member will have a much higher impact than a blurb with their name, rank etc…
4. Your Google My Business listing shouldn’t have any empty spaces. Log into your Google business account and fill in all the data points with the correct information about your company. Be sure to check old info to update your customers about any business changes.

How Can I Improve My Google Business SEO?

We’ve talked a lot about how businesses can use a Google My Business post for content marketing.

There is another area of your Google My Business listing we haven’t mentioned too much, and it has a huge impact on your Google SEO: customer reviews.

Reviews are a brilliant form of content marketing. You don’t need to approach them passively, because you can exert some influence over how many customers post a review and the quality of their reviews.

Like always, we have some super useful tips to help you get the most out of your review marketing.

Here are five ways to get the job done:

1. Every customer is a potential source of a review marketing post. Without being pushy, simply ask your customers to add a review to your GMB profile. Reviews are like Google posts from your customers, but they have the advantage of not expiring and being their own form of social media.
   
2. Once you get used to asking for reviews, try to help your customers use specific keywords in their reviews. Ask happy customers to mention the specific service or product they bought. This is how you can boost the relevance of your reviews.
   
3. Many businesses don’t write back to their customers. How rude! Google notifies the reviewer when someone responds to their review. So write back to your customers. Thank the happy ones and work harder to satisfy any unhappy reviewers.
   
4. Reviews make great posts on your business Google account, but you can do more. Try to get direct feedback from your customers so you can use it on your website, in a blog post, or as a small case study. Once you have it, you can mark it up in schema/JSON and get stars in the search results.
   
5. Your reviews don’t have to appear on your GMB listing to be effective. Reach out to other websites, especially industry sites, to try to have your local business reviewed on their site. The backlink will make your SEO strategy more effective and the review adds credibility to your business.

Local businesses can go beyond the GMB post to use review marketing in their GMB listing. The positive effects are many but include better placement on the Google maps results, higher rankings in local search engine results, and increased credibility in the eyes of Google and customers.

Do Google my business posts expire?

Google posts no longer expire after 7 days. This means that your posts from weeks, months or even years ago will remain in your Knowledge Panel as default. At GMB Crush, we know how important this Google update is to local SEO.

With Google My Business GMB Crush, you can easily analyze your competitors’ total post count and their publishing frequency within 90 days. With this data, you can plan out how often and how many posts you need to exceed your competitors’ numbers.

On the other hand, reviews too don’t disappear after a period of time. They could disappear for other reasons, though. If some of your reviews disappear, check out this list of possible reasons. Covid-19 posts on Google appear to remain longer as well.

Where do Google my business posts appear?

Google My Business posts appear in a carousel towards the bottom of the knowledge panel for local businesses. The posts appear from newest to oldest, and visitors can click through the different posts to engage with them. Google shows multiple posts with thumbnails, so there may be some advantage to keeping only one post active at a time because this will create a larger picture and space for a caption.

Takeaways

Google posts are very useful not just for communicating to your customers or updating them on what’s new but also for improving your local SEO.

With many business owners already harnessing the benefits of Google posts, your winning the game will now depend on whether you are doing better than your competitors or not.

GMB Crush can do a full audit of your competitors’ posts so that you can have a point of comparison and strategize to surpass their numbers.

GMB Post Checklist

Topical relevance is the key to avoid Google de-ranking your GMB posts.

Your last post should include your targeted keywords in the header and send strong location, search intent to avoid Google de-ranking. Be sure that these elements match what they expect for this category of content.
If you want to get ahead of the competition, this GMB Checklist is for YOU! With an easy actionable list that will give your business all sorts or tips and tricks on how they can improve your GMB post content strategy.

Click here now – it’s free 🙂 👇

SEO Lover, my motto is Action Over Words.