Google Business Profile Posts: Are They Worth Using?
Google Business Profile Posts are free, and take about five minutes each: a short update, offer or event that Google shows next to your listing on Search and Maps, without you touching your website at all. Worth doing, in short. The honest catch is what happens after you publish one, because most owners never find out whether it was actually seen.
What is a Post on your Google Business Profile?
A Post is a short piece of content you add directly to your free Business Profile, separate from your website and from any social account. Google's own guidance describes it plainly: a post lets a business share announcements, offers, updates and event details directly with customers on Search and Maps. Anyone who finds your listing sees it sitting there alongside your hours and your reviews, whether or not you have posted anything on Facebook or Instagram.
The three kinds of Post
You get three types to choose from. An Update is the general-purpose one: a description, a photo or video, and a button pointing at a booking page, an order page or wherever you want the click to land. An Offer is built for a promotion, with a title, start and end dates and an automatic "View offer" button, plus room for a coupon code and terms if you need them. An Event promotes something happening on a specific day, and if you leave the timing blank, Google shows it as running for 24 hours on the date you gave. None of the three costs anything beyond the time it takes to write them.
How long does a Post stay live?
Six months, unless you tell it otherwise. Google's guidance is explicit that posts older than six months are archived unless a date range is set. That matters most for an Offer or an Event: you want it gone the day it stops being true, not sitting there stale for weeks. Set the dates when you create it, and you will not have to remember to take it down later.
Where a Post actually shows up
On mobile, it sits in the Updates or Overview tab of your listing on Search and Maps. On a computer, it appears in the "From the owner" section of the same listing. That is the whole picture for most businesses: a Post lives on your profile and waits for someone to look. Google does pull some posts automatically into a more prominent, pre-surfaced spot on mobile, called featured posts, but its own guidance currently limits that placement to single-location food and drink businesses in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. If that is not you, your Posts still work exactly as described above. They just are not the ones Google pushes in front of someone who has not gone looking.
Can you tell whether anyone saw it?
Not reliably, and that is worth knowing before you invest much time in this. The regular performance report Google gives every Business Profile owner breaks your visits down by how people found you and what they did next, calls, direction requests, website clicks and so on, but it reports those for the profile as a whole. Nothing in that same report singles out one specific Post and tells you how many people saw it. If you want to know whether a Post did anything, the honest method is a before-and-after look at your overall profile visits and website clicks around the date you posted, not a number attached to the Post itself.
Is it worth the five minutes?
Yes, for the cost. A Post cannot replace what a website does, and it will not fix a listing nobody has claimed or verified in the first place, covered in the guide to setting one up. But it is a free way to show something current sits behind your listing, rather than a page nobody has touched in a year, and pairing it with a habit of asking for reviews gives a visitor two reasons to trust what they are looking at instead of one. Read the wider picture for getting found locally in the hub guide, and if you want a website your profile can point to properly, get in touch and we will show you a draft before anything is owed.