Google Posts: Conversion Factor-- Not Ranking Element
The importance of Google My Company
Your Google My Service listing is your brand-new homepage. If somebody desires your phone number, they don't have to go to your website to get it any longer. Or if they require your address to get directions or if they want to check out photos of your business or they want to see hours or evaluations, they can do it all right there on the search engine results page.
If you're a local service, one that serves consumers in person at a physical store area or that serves consumers at their location, like a plumber or an electrical expert, then you're qualified to have a Google My Business listing, and that listing is a significant aspect of your local SEO strategy. You need to stand apart from competitors and reveal potential consumers why they need to examine you out. Google Posts are one of the very best ways to do simply that thing.
How to utilize Google Posts effectively
For those of you who don't understand about Google Posts, they were released back in 2016, and they used to appear, up at the top of your Google My Company panel, and most businesses went bananas over them. In October of 2018, they moved them down to the really bottom of the GMB panel on desktop and out of the introduction panel on mobile outcomes, and most people sort of lost interest because they believed there would be a big loss of visibility.
However truthfully, it does not matter. They're still exceptionally reliable when they're used correctly.
Posts are essentially free advertising on Google. You heard that right. They're totally free marketing. They show up in Google search results page. Seriously, specifically efficient on mobile when they're blended in with other natural results.
Even on desktop, they help your business attract prospective customers and stand out from other local competitors. More significantly, they can drive pre-site conversions. You've heard about zero-click search. Now people can transform without getting to your website. They look like a thumbnail, an image with a bit of text beneath. When the user clicks on the thumbnail, the whole post pops up in a pop-up window that basically fills the window on either mobile or desktop.
Now they have no influence on ranking. They're a conversion aspect, not a ranking aspect. Think about it by doing this though. If it takes you 10 minutes to develop a post and you do only one a week, that's simply 40 minutes a month. If you get a conversion, isn't it worth doing? If you do them properly, you can get a lot more than just one conversion.
In the past, I would have informed you that posts remain live in your profile for seven days, unless you utilize among the post design templates that consists of a date variety, in which case they stay live for the whole date range. It looks like Google has changed the way that posts work, and now Google shows your 10 most current posts in a carousel with a little arrow to scroll through. Then when you get to the end of those 10 posts, it has a link to view all of your older posts.
Now you should not pay attention to most of what you see online about Posts due to the fact that there's an outrageous amount of false information or simply dated details out there.
Prevent words on the "no-no" list
Anything with sexual connotation will get your post denied. Or if you're a plumber and you post about "toilet repair work" or "unclogging a toilet", you get denied for using the word "toilet.".
So beware if you have anything that may be on that no-no, naughty list.
Use an attracting thumbnail
.
The complete post contains an image. A complete post has the image and then text with approximately 1,500 characters, which's all most people focus on. The post thumbnail is the essential to success. Nobody is going to see the full post if the thumbnail isn't attracting enough to click.
Think about it like you're developing a paid search project. You need actually engaging copy if you want more clicks on your ad or a really awesome image to bring in attention if it's a banner image. The same principle uses to posts.
Make them marketing.
It's likewise important to be sure that your posts are marketing. Individuals are seeing these posts in the search results before they go to your site. In most cases they have no idea who you are.
The normal social fluff that you share on other social platforms doesn't work. Do not share links to post or a simple "Hey, we offer this" message due to the fact that those do not work. Remember, your users are shopping around and attempting to find out where they want to purchase, so you want to get their attention with something advertising.
Choose the right template.
Most of the stuff out there will tell you that the post thumbnail displays 100 characters of text or about 16 words burglarized 4 unique lines. But in reality, it's different depending on which post template you utilize and whether or not you consist of a call to action link, which then replaces that last line of text.
But, hello, we're all online marketers. Why would not we consist of a CTA link?
In the huge bulk of cases, you want to utilize the What's New post template. Now with the What's New post, as soon as you consist of that call to action, it replaces that last line so you end up with three complete lines of readily available text area.
Now that posts stay live and visible forever, there's no advantage there. Both of those post types have that separate title line, then a separate date variety line, and then the call to action link is going to be on the 4th line, which leaves you only a single line of text or just a couple of words to compose something compelling.
Sure, the Offer post has a cool little cost emoji there next to the title and some minimal voucher functionality, however that's not a reason. You should have full coupon functionality on your website. It's better to compose something engaging with a "What's New" post design template and then have the user click through on the call to action link to get to your site to get more details and convert there.
If you have actually got an active COVID post, Google conceals all of your other active posts. If you want to share a COVID details post or updates about COVID, it's much better to utilize the What's New post template instead.
Focus on image cropping.
The image is the aggravating part of things. You could post the same image multiple times and it will crop a little in a different way each time.
The important areas of your image can get cropped out, so half of your product winds up being gone, or your text gets cropped out, or things get really difficult to read. Now there's a basic cropping tool constructed into the image upload function with posts, but it's not locked to an element ratio. So then you're going to wind up penzu.com/p/7e59dd78 with black bars either on the leading or on the side if you don't crop it to the correct element ratio, which is, by the way, 1200 pixels width by 900 pixels high.
You need to have a handle on what the safe location is within the image. So to make things easier, we created this Google Posts Cropping Guide. It's a Photoshop document with integrated guides to show you what the safe area is. You can download it at bit.ly/ posts-image-guide. Ensure you put that in lowercase because it's case delicate.
But it looks like this. Anything within that white grid is safe and that's what's going to appear because post thumbnail. Then when you see the full post, the rest of the image shows up. You can get truly creative and have things like here's the image, but then when it pops up, there's extra text at the bottom.
Consist of UTM tracking.
Now, for the call to action link, you require to be sure that you consist of UTM tracking, because Google Analytics doesn't constantly attribute that traffic correctly, particularly on mobile.
Now if you include UTM tagging, you can make sure that the clicks are attributed to Google organic, and after that you can use the campaign variable to differentiate in between the posts that you published so you'll have the ability to see which post produced more click-throughs or more conversions and after that you can adjust your technique moving on to utilize the more efficient post types.
So for those of you that aren't super knowledgeable about UTM tagging, it's essentially including a query string like this to the end of the URL that you're tagging so it forces Google Analytics to attribute the session a certain way that you're specifying.
Here's the structure that I suggest utilizing when you do Google posts. UTM_Medium is Organic, and UTM_Campaign is some sort of post identifier. Some people like to utilize Google as the source.
At a high level, when you look at your source medium report, that traffic all gets lumped together with everything from Google. In some cases it's puzzling for clients who don't really understand that they can look at secondary dimensions to break apart that traffic. More importantly, it's much easier for you to see your post traffic independently when you look at the default source medium report.
You want to leave organic as your medium so that it's lumped and organized correctly on the default channel report with all natural traffic. Then you enter some sort of identifier, some sort of text string or date that can let you understand which post you're discussing with that project variable. Make sure it's something unique so that you understand which publish you're talking about, whether it's automobile post, oil post, or a date variety or the title of the post so you understand when you're looking in Google Analytics.
It's likewise important to point out that Google My Service Insights will reveal you the number of views and clicks, however it's a bit complicated due to the fact that numerous impressions and/or several clicks from the same users are counted individually. That's why including the UTM tagging is so important for tracking properly your performance.
Upload videos.
Final note, you can also publish videos so a video displays in the thumbnail and in the post.
When users see that thumbnail that has a little play button on it and they click it, when the post pops up, the video will play there. Now the file size limit is 30 seconds or 75 MB, which if you got commercials, that's generally the best size. Even though they have actually been around for a couple of years, a lot of services still ignore Posts. Now you understand how to rock Posts so you'll stick out from rivals and create more click-throughs.