Google Posts: Instantly Add Content Directly Into Search Results
June 26, 2017Google Posts is now officially available to ALL small businesses
If you haven’t already noticed… companies that are using the GMB (Google My Business) platform will now see the ability to add “posts” which will appear in both Google search and maps results when someone searches for the company within the Google search system.
Yes, that means you can add content DIRECTLY into the search results. Instantly.
Cool, huh?
A couple of weeks ago, the company moved Google Posts into GMB, and that is where you can access it now — on both the desktop and the Google My Business Android and iOS apps.
Go to your GMB account and click on “Posts” on the left-side menu when you are in your Google business listing. You should see a blank page that looks like this:
When creating a post, you are given the ability to upload an image, write up to 300 words of text, and create an event with start and end dates and times. The immediate use cases that come to mind for real estate are to display featured listings, or possibly even a few of your premier open houses as an event.
Users can also add call-to-action buttons including “Learn more,” “Reserve,” “Sign up,” “Buy” or “Get offer” dropping visitors onto whatever URL you’ve chosen. With this option, I could see using putting up a “What’s My Home Worth?” valuation landing page offer to try to capture some free seller leads.
Here is a screen shot of that input interface:
As you can see, it’s pretty basic and once you’ve published a post, it will appear to customers on Google Search and Maps in just a few minutes time. In fact, it was there by the time I hit refresh!
Here’s the one I created on our fictitious real estate company’s page to show what it actually looks like once published (highlighted in red):
So hopefully now more than ever, you can see the advantages of having a GMB page setup for your company… AND how this new feature can be used to help promote and grow your business.
Comments