By Josh Kandle

One of the newest features of the Google My Business dashboard is the ability to create posts. This is a bid by Google to get business owners to stay engaged with their Google My Business dashboards. In return, Google enables business owners to post their own custom content in the search results that are displayed when people search for a business by name.

Josh Kandle,

The knowledge paragraph is simply the panel of information that is displayed when someone searches for your product, service or company. If you search for your company’s name and don’t see a panel of information, it means you haven’t established and verified your Google My Business Listing.

1. Back to Google posts. Is it worth it? Here are the top four reasons you should be using Google posts:
2. It’s free — yay! How many marketing activities can you say that about?
3. Posts give you the ability to get more of your core content in front of prospective customers.
4. Having posts present in your knowledge panel pushes down the “people also searched for” section that Google populates. This section is nearly always filled with your competitors and who doesn’t want to push their competitors down a bit?
5. Using Google posts correlates with a small boost in visibility for your business in Google’s search results, according to an informal study by Google My Business top contributor Joy Hawkins.

Using Google posts is not going to open the floodgates of traffic. They are for prospective customers already somewhat familiar with your brand and already have done a branded search. The posts can, however, entice more clicks, which you can send to targeted pages of your site.

Here are seven tips on best practices.

1. Google has made it easy to use the posts feature. If you can post on Facebook, you’ll do fine. You’ll want to have an image, 100 to 300 words and a link to somewhere on the web you want people to go.
2. Focus the content of your posts on differentiating factors. What makes your organization or offer unique? Give them a reason to click.
3. List events when you have them. They last longer as the post doesn’t expire until the event does.
4. Post every week. These little buggers expire after seven days so you have to do a little leg work. Currently, there is no way to automate the process. However, Google has recently made some changes that hint this functionality might soon be possible through third-party services.
5. Image size should be 750-by-750 pixels. Make sure the most important parts of the image are centered because the top and bottom will get cut off on certain device viewports.
6. Posts must be between 100 to 300 words in length but only the first 100 characters are shown in the knowledge panel. The rest is truncated, so make sure your all-star text is comes first.
7. Use trackable links to get data on what posts bring traffic and do more of those.

The bottom line is that Google posts make your knowledge paragraph more robust and anything you can do to make your presence on Google more robust is a good thing for your business.

[panel title="About Josh Kandle:" style="info"]

Josh Kandle is the creative director for Cougar Digital Marketing & Design in West Richland.