Every business owner is looking for ways to show up higher in Google searches for relevant local search terms. For this reason, your local business’s posts on Google My Business are more important than ever.
Setting Up Your Google My Business Page
The most important thing for a business to do, besides enhancing the local SEO on their website, is to make sure their business has a Google My Business page. Additionally, you want to make sure you have verified ownership of that page. In fact, having a verified and well-optimized GMB page is the simplest way to get your business to rank one the first page for local searches.
If you need help getting started, or want some guidelines on the business verification process through the GMB platform, check out our blog post covering how to verify your Google My Business listing.
Where Will a Google My Business Post Show Up?
When a local search is performed that triggers your GMB listing on a desktop/laptop computer, your post will appear under the knowledge graph, which contains information about your business. The knowledge graph for your business listing will show up on the right side of the search engine results page on desktops as well as in Google Maps on mobile devices.
How Often Should You Post on GMB?
Once you have your GMB listing set up and fully optimized, you should start posting new content about 2-3 times a week because it will help to drive more organic traffic to your website and give you more “real estate” on the search engine results page (SERP). All businesses (not just local businesses) should take advantage of the Google My Business posting feature. GMB posts have a ton of benefits for local business owners because they will appear alongside your GMB listing in search results.
7 Benefits of GMB Posts for Local SEO
- Offer Free Advertising: GMB posts are a free way to advertise your business, products, services, sales, special discounts, offer, events, or anything else you want to showcase about your business.
- Increases Your Reach: Increasing visibility for your business’s most important local search terms.
- Improves Brand Awareness: Posting will allow you to display your brand to wider audiences.
- Enhances Communication with Customers: Will your business be closed on Tuesday because of an emergency? Do you have new business hours because of the current COVID-19 pandemic? Extended hours for holiday shopping? Google My Business posts allow you to notify customers about any such timely updates and give you another avenue of communication to keep your customers in your sales funnel.
- Increases organic traffic to your website: Engaging images and/or videos with a link back to relevant content on your website will directly increase the organic search traffic for your business.
- Boosts Phone Calls & Direction Requests: By taking up more real estate with your GMB posts, you’re much more likely to have local users click through to your profile, to call your business directly, or request directions via Google Maps. Alternatively, you can include this information directly in all your posts to further increase these metrics.
- Encourages Customer Reviews & Increases Trust: Letting your customers know they can review your business is a fantastic method to increase the number of good reviews. The more positive reviews you have, the more people will trust that you’re a reliable and trustworthy business.
Do Google My Business Posts Improve Local SEO Rankings?
A case study by Search Engine Land, tested two businesses on this point. One company was a local garage flooring company in Vancouver, and the other was a church in Keswick, Ontario. In this experiment, they posted twice per week to test if that frequency had any effect on their local SEO keyword rankings.
After publishing posts about garage flooring, they saw an increase in ranking for the search term “garage flooring” from position 7 in the local map pack to position 2. The church saw similar success with an increase from position 5 in the Google map pack to position 3 for the keyword “church keswick”.
Increasing GMB Post Frequency for Our Client
At Efferent Media, we provide Google My Business Listing optimization and regular postings to keep your business relevant, increase your local SEO rankings, and help keep your customers engaged and updated on anything new or any other important messaging. We also post and promote our clients’ products and services, which has shown a direct increase in both traffic and clickthrough rate (CTR). Recently, after increasing the post frequency for one of our clients from once a week to twice a week, we recorded an average increase of 11.63% in clickthrough rate to several different pages on their website.
If you’d like to have a Google My Business page set up for your local business and get more website traffic, foot traffic, phone calls, direction requests, and ultimately more customers, we can help. Even if you have a GMB page already, we can make sure it’s fully optimized and promote your business with regular posts.
Improve Your Search Rankings with Efferent Media
Want to take your business to the next level? Efferent Media has a variety of marketing packages to fulfill all your needs. From SEO/search result rankings to lead generation, social media, ads, content marketing, web design and more; Efferent Media can improve your online visibility and authority, manage your social media community, and get you more clients. Contact us online today to get started or give us a call.