Google has been constantly releasing updates this year for Local Search, and the latest thing to drop is Google Posts. This new feature allows you to publish your products, services and events directly to the Knowledge Panel in Google Search and Google Maps.

Here are the top 10 things you need to know to get the most out of Google Posts for your business.

  1. Use the posts to highlight promotions not to stuff keywords. Shoving a bunch of keywords into your post will not help with organic rankings.
  2. Only the first 100 characters will show up in the Knowledge Panel. Make each character count so your sentence doesn’t get cut off with an ellipses.
  3. If you have multiple posts, the newest ones will show first. Older posts will still show up in a carousel format near the bottom of the listing, but these URLs do not get indexed by Google (unlike Google+ posts), so there is no SEO juice to squeeze here at the moment.
  4. Be sure to track click activity with UTM codes. Google posts don’t integrate naturally with Google Analytics, so it’s hard to get any data beyond the number of views and clicks Google provides inside the Google My Business dashboard. By creating a custom URL to use in the call-to-action link, you can see more data about the users in Google Analytics and find out if they converted after visiting your site. For example, instead of linking the button to www.yourdomain.com, link it to www.yourdomain.com/?utm_source=GoogleMyBusiness&utm_medium=Organic&utm_campaign=Posts instead.
  5. The best image size to use is 750 x 750.  Anything smaller than 250 x 250 won’t be accepted. Animated GIFs and videos are not currently supported.
  6. Businesses in the “hotel” category don’t currently have the option to post.
  7. Post often. The posts only stay live for 7 days, and there currently isn’t a way to schedule posts. Fortunately, event posts will stay live until the event is over.
  8. Google will scroll up to 10 posts in a carousel but only the first 2.5 are seen on the search results without scrolling.
  9. Each post has a unique URL, so you can easily share them in a few clicks.
  10. Make sure the images are “center-weighted”. The image crop, if this isn’t applied, can accidentally chop your head off.

Have you observed anything else interesting about Google Posts? If so, feel free to share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or leave a comment below.

If you would like more information on Google Posts, check out this guide on the My Google Business support blog.