Google Business Profile Posts are the closest thing your profile has to a content feed, and most businesses either ignore the feature entirely or treat it like a second Facebook page. Neither approach gets much out of it. I use Posts on client profiles every week, and the businesses that stick with it consistently outperform the ones that post once, forget about it, and wonder why nothing changed.

What Posts Actually Do

A Post shows up directly on your Google Business Profile, in the panel searchers see when they find you in Search or Maps. It can include an image, up to 1,500 characters of text (though only the first couple hundred display before a “read more” truncation), and a call-to-action button that links out to a page on your site, a booking form, or a phone number. Standard update posts expire after seven days. Event posts can run for the length of the event. Offer posts can include coupon codes and redemption terms.

Posts do not appear to carry a large direct ranking weight on their own. What they do is keep your profile looking active and give Google fresh, categorizable text to associate with your business. I have also watched Posts move the needle on click-through behavior: a searcher comparing three similar businesses in the map pack is more likely to click into the one that visibly has something current happening.

The Four Post Types and When to Use Each

  • What’s New. The general-purpose update post. Use this for the bulk of your weekly cadence: a recent project, a seasonal reminder, a staffing update, anything timely.
  • Event. Use this for anything with a specific start and end date, a sale, a workshop, a community event you are sponsoring. These stay live for the duration of the event rather than expiring in seven days, which makes them worth using for anything that runs longer than a week.
  • Offer. Built specifically for promotions, with fields for a coupon code, terms, and start and end dates. If you run recurring specials, this is the format Google built for exactly that use case, and it is underused.
  • Product. If you sell discrete products or packaged services, this format lets you list them with a price and a description, functioning almost like a mini catalog inside the profile.

A Cadence That Is Actually Sustainable

The advice I give clients is one post per week, minimum, and I mean that literally, not as an aspirational target that slips. Consistency matters more than volume here. A profile with one post every week for a year looks and performs better than a profile with eight posts in one burst followed by six months of silence.

To make weekly posting sustainable, I batch content. Once a month, sit down and draft four to six posts at once: a recent completed job with a photo, a seasonal tip relevant to your industry, a reminder of a service people forget you offer, and anything time-sensitive like a holiday closure or a promotion. Schedule them out so you are not scrambling every Monday morning to think of something to say.

Photos matter more than the copy. A real photo from a real job, even an unremarkable one, outperforms a stock image or a text-only post. If you do field work, get in the habit of taking one photo per job specifically for this purpose.

Writing Posts That Do Not Read Like Ads

The biggest mistake I see is treating every Post like a sales pitch. “Call us today for the best service in town!” tells the reader nothing and reads as noise. Compare that to a post that says what you actually did: “Replaced a failing water heater in Chandler this week, same-day appointment, four-year-old unit that had a manufacturer defect we caught during inspection.” That is specific, it is credible, and it quietly demonstrates expertise without asking for anything.

Include a call-to-action button on every post. Link it to the most relevant page on your site, not always your homepage. A post about a specific service should link to that service page. A post about a location should link to that location’s page if you have one. This is a small thing that a lot of businesses skip because the default button just says “Learn more” and points nowhere in particular.

Common Posting Mistakes

  • Letting posts expire without replacement. If your last What’s New post ran out seven days ago and nothing replaced it, your profile has an empty content section sitting in front of every searcher until you post again. Batching content ahead of time prevents this gap.
  • Reusing the exact same image repeatedly. A logo graphic posted week after week reads as low effort. Rotate through real photos.
  • Writing posts with no clear point. A vague update that does not tell the reader anything specific gets skipped over. Specificity is what makes a post worth reading.
  • Forgetting the call-to-action link. An easy field to leave on the default setting, which wastes the one piece of the post that can actually drive a click to your site.

Posts for Multi-Location Businesses

Each location profile has its own independent Posts feed, which means content has to be duplicated or adapted per location rather than posted once centrally. For businesses with more than a handful of locations, this is where a simple content calendar earns its keep: draft the core message once, then localize the specifics, a mention of the neighborhood, a location-specific photo, a location-specific staff name, for each profile before publishing. Posting the identical, unedited text across every location works, but it performs noticeably worse than content that reads as genuinely local to whoever is looking at that specific profile.

What to Track

Your Insights data will show you post views and, in some cases, clicks on the call-to-action button. Do not expect Posts alone to move your map pack ranking in a measurable way; that is not what the data supports. What you are watching for is whether posting consistently correlates with more profile engagement overall, more calls, more direction requests, more website clicks, over a period of a few months. If you cannot tell whether Posts are doing anything, that is usually a sign the cadence has been too sporadic to judge, not that the feature does not work.

For the full picture of how Posts fit alongside the rest of your profile, see my Google Business Profile optimization guide.