Case Studies Reveal Impacts of Google Posts on Rankings
Google Posts is one of the newer things for most content marketers and online business owners. Basically, with Google Posts, you can create up to three posts and add them directly to your business’s Knowledge Graph results.
This can be easily done in the Google My Business account. However, the posts you create expire within seven days, so it is important to track them and replace the old posts with new ones each week.
Anyway, since the release of Google Posts, some content marketers have been using them. However, not all of them believe that they are worth spending their time on and, therefore, try to fully utilize its unexplored potential.
Thankfully, we now have some empirical data to base our decisions on regarding Google Posts.
Columnists Joy Hawkins teamed up with Ben Fisher from Steady Demand to test whether or not regularly publishing Google Posts has any impact on search engine rankings and website traffic.
The case study was done on two different types of websites:
1. A local garage flooring company
2. A church (which did not have any SEO or marketing efforts going on)
After publishing Google Posts, the garage flooring business jumped up one position in the local search results for the keyword “garage flooring Vancouver”. In less than a week, the business started appearing on the third position in the search engine results, instead of the usual fourth position.
Moreover, for the term “garage flooring”, the ranking improved from 7th to 2nd position within just four days of creating and publishing Google Posts.
For the Church, Google Posts managed to increase the website search engine ranking from #5 to #3 for the keyword “church Keswick”.
Furthermore, Google Posts also drove a good amount of traffic to the church website — which wasn’t the case with the garage flooring company. The researchers tagged the URLs with UTM codes to identify that the additional traffic was indeed coming from Google Posts.
One of the highlights was a bio/spotlight Google Post that the church website published about one of the pastors. Although the post managed to drive a few dozen extra website visitors, it couldn’t manage to encourage any engagement from those visitors.
What Do We Think About Google Posts?
We believe that Google Posts is a good step by Google to present another opportunity for driving traffic. More importantly, we do believe that content marketers should not let go of this opportunity.
If other content marketers and businesses (your competitors) aren’t using Google Posts, it becomes all the more important to you. When they are not using a platform, you will be able to stand out with it.
Google Posts work especially well with recognizable brands. Moreover, if your business runs offers, discount programs, or events that gather people, Google Posts is the perfect way to make those announcements and keep them pinned for at least seven days.
Based on these results, we can safely conclude the following:
- Google Posts did improve search engine rankings for both businesses.
- Google Posts do not take more than a few minutes to create every week. Therefore, unsurprisingly, they aren’t going to produce stellar results for you either. They require less effort, and they lead to minor improvements, as can be seen in these case studies. It also means that you should not just rely on Google Posts. Instead, it is crucial to combine Google Posts with other content marketing and SEO efforts to produce the best overall results.
- Unlike what we have seen previously with posting on Google Plus, the websites maintained their new (improved) positions weeks after they stopped publishing new Google Posts. This refers to a more long-term impact — which is a good thing.
- Google My Business insights are not 100% accurate. For best results, you should use UTM codes in the URLs you use.
Note: Before you get too impressed with these results, it is important to note that the tests were done in low-competitive industries. It is understandable as, otherwise, it would have taken too long to produce any noticeable results. When you use Google Posts, it would be best to wait substantially longer than this to see any growth.
The bottom line is that Google Posts is being seriously underutilized by businesses. Do not make that mistake.
Apart from driving new traffic visitors, creating brand awareness, Google Posts can also improve your business’s search engine rankings. Make sure that you are not neglecting them.
Hey, Hamit,
So many thanks for sharing a totally new concept. I have learned about Google post from your post. Great case study. I will try to do Google post once a week at least. Have a great weekend.