Google Business posts: updates, offers and events

Google Business posts are short updates that appear on your listing in Search and Maps. They are the one part of the profile you can change daily without touching anything structural, which makes them useful and also makes them the first thing every business abandons after two weeks.

The three types

Update

The general-purpose post: news, a new service, a seasonal note, a photo of work you finished. Historically these expired from the main view after about a week, so an update posted once a month leaves your listing blank most of the time.

Offer

A promotion with a start and end date, and optionally a coupon code, terms and a redemption link. Offers stay visible for their whole date range, which makes them the most durable post type. A three-month offer holds the slot for three months.

Event

A titled event with a start and end datetime. Visible until the event ends. Useful for anything genuinely time-bound: a class, an open day, a sale weekend.

Call-to-action buttons

Every post can carry one button. The options are Book, Order online, Buy, Learn more, Sign up and Call now. The first five take a URL; Call now uses your listing's phone number.

Two mistakes are near-universal. First, no button at all — the post describes something and gives the reader nowhere to go. Second, every button pointing at the homepage. If the post is about a service, link to that service's page. The click you already earned is the expensive part.

What makes a post worth reading

• Lead with the thing. The preview truncates. Put the offer, the date or the news in the first line, not after a paragraph of throat-clearing.
• One image, and a real one. Photos of your actual work outperform stock imagery badly. A phone photo of a finished job beats a polished picture of someone else's.
• Specific beats promotional. "Rewired a 1970s three-bedroom in Shastri Nagar this week — old fuse box to a modern consumer unit in a day" tells a reader more about whether you can help them than "Quality electrical services you can trust!"
• Do not keyword stuff. Posts are read by people. Writing for a ranking algorithm that is not reading them costs you the reader you had.

Why scheduling is the whole game

Posting is not hard. Posting consistently is, because it depends on remembering, on a Tuesday, to do something that has no deadline. Every business starts strong and stops.

The fix is to separate writing from publishing. Sit down once a month, write six posts in one session while you are in the right headspace, and schedule them across the weeks ahead. Writing six posts at once takes well under an hour; writing one post six times takes six separate acts of remembering, and the sixth never happens.

Growbiz queues scheduled posts and a worker publishes them to Google at the minute you picked, with retries and a visible failure state if Google rejects one. Your listing stays current on a month of effort.

A month of posts, if you are stuck

1. Recent work. A photo of a finished job and one sentence about what it involved.
2. A common question. Whatever customers ask on the phone every week, answered.
3. Seasonal relevance. Monsoon prep, festival hours, winter servicing — whatever your trade's calendar actually is.
4. A service you are underselling. The one people are surprised you offer.
5. A team member. Who they are, what they are good at. These perform unusually well.
6. An offer. With a real date range, because it holds the slot.

Measuring without over-reading

Google reports views and clicks per post, and the numbers are usually modest. That is the wrong reason to stop. Posts are not primarily a traffic channel; they are a liveness signal on a listing where the alternative is a blank space, and they are visible at the exact moment someone is deciding between you and the next result.

Watch clicks per post over a quarter to learn which topics land, and ignore week-to-week noise. If you want numbers that actually move, look at calls, direction requests and website clicks on the listing as a whole.

Post policies to respect

• No misleading or false claims about products, prices or availability.
• No phone numbers in the post body — use the Call now button.
• No offensive or adult content, no content unrelated to your business.
• Offers need honest terms; a discount that nobody can actually claim is a policy problem.

Rejected posts do not publish, and repeat violations put the listing at risk. Growbiz surfaces Google's rejection reason rather than failing silently, so you can fix and repost. Posts pair naturally with fresh photos — both are freshness signals, and the photo you take for a post usually belongs on the listing too.