Many businesses struggle to get their name into the top ten search results in order to greatly increase traffic to their website or have a better image to potential clients. Those who are successful invest a lot of time and money in SEO and other inbound marketing to gain this prestige and online presence for their brand. What if there was a free and simple way to improve your search rankings? There is, and it’s called Google Posts.
What they can do
Google Posts allow users to communicate directly in the search results. This differs from the Knowledge Panel since you can highlight content, information, products, or services. Google Post can appear on the search results, Knowledge Panel, or both.
Google simply describes it as “up-to-date posts from verified people, places, or things, directly in search results.” These posts can be text, images, videos, events, or even animated GIFs. You can even add links on the posts to drive traffic to a particular page, service, or product. This enhanced format enables searchers to get information directly from you while complementing existing search results across the web.
Postings
Your posting instantly shows up in search results on both mobile and desktop platforms. You can then schedule the time and duration of the post with ease. This is a great feature that provides immediate access and can be particularly useful when you are planning to launch a product, open a pop-up store, or run a promotion. Also, Google Analytics will give you updates on how many people have seen and interacted with your content.
Move over Google+
Google is finalizing the transition of businesses from Google+ to Google Posts. Once part of businesses’ social media strategy, big changes came to Google+. April 2, 2019 marked the official shut down of the consumer version of Google+. Small business will still be able to use Google+ to interact with customers, but only those who are G Suite Android users. Those same businesses can now use Google Posts as an easier way to communicate directly with prospects and customers in Google’s search results.
Availability
Google Posts is available to everyone with a Google My Business account. Log in or create a profile for your business. Once you’re in your account, Posts will be an option on the left hand navigation. It doesn’t take a lot of time to create a Post, so you can make it part of your social media promotional strategy. But you will have to create one in real time, since Google doesn’t allow third party tools like Hootsuite to post for you.
Will Google Posts increase your SEO? Only time will tell if it will be as impactful as we hoped. As with Google + and Google Authorship, Google likes to test out new features, which sadly don’t always catch on. However, Google is always hungry for fresh content. As the number one driver of traffic for business, Google Posts makes sense.