# How to Use Google Business Profile Posts to Get Seen by Local Customers > A step-by-step guide to the free posts feature on your Google Business Profile, with real examples for a bakery, plumber, and salon. What to post, how often, and what gets rejected. *Roald, Founder Fonzy · Jul 21, 2026 · 8 min read* Source: https://www.fonzy.ai/blog/google-business-profile-posts --- **Short answer:** Google Business Profile posts are free updates that show on your Search and Maps listing under "Updates" or "Offers." Create one from your profile, add a photo, a short line, and an action button, then post a couple of times a month. They keep your listing active and put fresh offers in front of searchers right now. A post is the closest thing you have to a free ad on your own listing. When someone searches your bakery's name, or "bakery near me," Google shows your profile: hours, photos, reviews, and a strip of your recent posts. That strip is space you control. Most owners never touch it, which is exactly why touching it works. This guide assumes you already have a verified profile. If you do not, set that up first, then come back. Everything here is about one feature: the posts, sometimes labeled updates, that sit on your listing and do quiet work while you run the shop. ## What are Google Business Profile posts, and where do they show? A post is a short update you publish straight to your Business Profile. It appears in two of the most valuable places on the internet for a local business: your listing in Google Search and your pin in Google Maps. On Search, recent posts show in a "Updates" or "From the owner" section of your profile panel. On Maps, they surface when someone taps your business. Think of it like a bulletin board bolted to your front window, except the window faces every phone in town. This is not a new or experimental feature. According to BrightLocal's guide on Google posts, written by local search specialist Claire Carlile, Google rolled the feature out back in 2017, and it was not available to everyone at first. The hotel and lodging industry, for instance, could not use posts until 2021. The point is that this is a stable, mature part of the product, not a beta that will vanish next quarter. It is safe to build a small habit around it. One rule shapes everything else. Google's own Business Profile help documentation says posts older than six months are automatically archived unless you set a date range on the post. Publish once and forget, and your window goes blank in half a year. That single fact is the argument for posting on a rhythm instead of once. ## Know the three post types before you write one Google gives you three kinds of post, and picking the right one takes ten seconds once you know them. Google's Business Profile help documentation lists them as Updates, Offers, and Events. An Update is the everyday post: news, a new product, a photo, a short note. Use it for most of what you do. An Event is anything with a start and end: a tasting, a sale weekend, a pop-up, a class. It carries a title and a date range. An Offer is the one that earns its keep. Google's documentation notes that an Offer requires a title, a start and end date, and a time, and it automatically adds a "View Offer" button to your post. That button is a real call to action sitting on your Search listing, at no cost. A salon running "20 percent off first colour, this month only" as an Offer gets a clickable button most competitors never bother to add. If you only ever learn one type, learn Offers. It is the post with a button. ## Create your first post, step by step Here is the whole flow, start to finish, from your Business Profile. First, open your profile. Search your own business name while signed in to the Google account that manages it, or open the Google Business Profile app. Your management options appear right on the listing. Second, find the posts control. Look for "Add update," "Offer," or "Event." These are the same three types from above. Third, pick the type that fits what you are announcing. Selling something on a deadline, choose Offer. Running a one-off, choose Event. Everything else, choose Update. Fourth, add a photo. A wide, real photo of the actual thing, the tray of croissants, the finished bathroom, the fresh cut, not a stock image. Fifth, write your copy. One or two short lines. Semrush's guide on Google Business Profile posts notes that a post gives you up to 1,500 characters of text, but you rarely need to fill it. Say the thing and stop. Sixth, add the action button. Choose the one that matches what you want: Call now, Book, Order online, Learn more, or the automatic View Offer button on an Offer post. Seventh, publish, or schedule it for later. Then check your live listing to confirm it looks right. The first post takes five minutes. The tenth takes ninety seconds. ## Decide what to actually post The blank box is where most owners freeze. Do not overthink it. Post the things you would tell a regular who walked in and asked "anything new?" A bakery posts the Saturday special before Saturday: "Fresh sourdough and cinnamon rolls, out of the oven at 8am." Then a seasonal Offer in December: "Order your Christmas loaf by the 20th." Then a photo of a new pastry the day it lands on the shelf. A plumber posts a new service the week it launches: "We now do same-week boiler servicing across the north side." Then a seasonal Update before the first cold snap: "Book your winter check before the frost, avoid the emergency call-out." Then a quick before-and-after photo of a job done well. A salon posts a midweek Offer to fill slow chairs: "Tuesday and Wednesday, 20 percent off cuts this month." Then an Event for a bridal trial day. Then a photo of a fresh balayage, tagged with the stylist's first name. Notice the pattern. Every one is a specific, time-bound, real thing with a photo, not a slogan. In the years of doing this work for owner-run shops, the posts that go flat are almost always the abstract ones, the "quality service you can trust" kind. The ones that pull a call are concrete: a named product, a real price, a deadline this week. When an owner switches from posting about their brand to posting the one specific thing happening on Thursday, the tone of the whole listing changes from a billboard to a shop that is clearly open and busy. That shift is the entire game. If you want your posts to sit inside a listing that is fully worked, the [complete profile optimization checklist](/blog/google-business-profile-optimization) covers the hours, categories, and photos that make each post land harder. ## Write a post that gets the click A post is a tiny ad, so treat the parts like ad parts. The photo does the heavy lifting. It is what stops the scroll on a phone. Use a real, bright, wide shot of the actual thing you are posting about. The copy is a headline, not a paragraph. Lead with the offer or the news in the first six words, because that is all most people read. "Half-price desserts, Friday only" beats three sentences of setup every time. The button is the whole point of posting. Match it to the one action you want: Book for the salon, Call for the plumber, Order online for the bakery. On an Offer, Google adds View Offer for you. Say one thing. Show one photo. Ask for one action. A post trying to do three jobs does none of them. Local search runs on this kind of small, consistent signal, and posts are one of several. If you want the fuller picture of how a small business shows up nearby, the guide to [local SEO for small businesses](/blog/local-seo-for-small-business) puts posts in context with reviews, citations, and categories. ## Set how often to post, and schedule ahead Because Google archives posts after six months, a dead listing is a slow leak. The fix is a light rhythm: two to four posts a month is plenty for most shops. One weekly is great if you have the material, but a stale weekly beats a frantic daily that runs out of steam in a fortnight. You do not have to sit down every week to do it. Google's Business Profile help documentation says posts can be scheduled for a later date and set to publish on a recurring basis, weekly, monthly, or on a custom schedule. A plumber can spend one hour on a Sunday, line up a month of Updates, and set the seasonal reminder to repeat every year. The listing then stays alive on its own. Batch the boring part. Post the same way you order stock: once, on a schedule, ahead of time. ## Do posts actually help you rank locally? Here is the honest answer This is the question everyone asks, so here is the straight version: posting will not vault you up the map pack on its own. Owners and practitioners discussing this on r/localseo, in a thread titled "Do Google Business Profile posts still matter for rankings?", land on the same honest read. One reply sums it up: posts are "definitely a signal to Google that your business is engaged and doing business," but that person had "yet to see it really affect rankings much." That is the right way to hold it. A post is a freshness and engagement signal, not a ranking lever you crank. It tells Google, and the person looking at your listing, that you are open, active, and doing business this week. What it reliably does is win the click once you already show up: a live Offer with a button beats a dusty listing next to it. What it does not do is replace the real ranking work, your categories, reviews, and proximity. If moving up the map itself is the goal, the specific levers live in the guide to [ranking higher on Google Maps](/blog/rank-higher-google-maps), and steady [getting more Google reviews](/blog/how-to-get-more-google-reviews) moves the needle far more than any single post. Treat posts as the thing that converts the visibility, not the thing that creates it. ## Avoid the mistakes that get a post rejected Google reviews posts against its content guidelines, and a rejected post is wasted work. The most common trip-up is one specific thing. Google's Business Profile help documentation says a post that includes a phone number in the description may get rejected. It reads as spammy to Google, and your number is already on your profile anyway, so leave it out of the post copy and let the Call button do that job. The rest is common sense. No promotional gimmicks that break the guidelines, no misleading claims, no low-quality or unrelated images, no links to anything shady. Keep the copy about the real thing you are offering, put the action in the button, and you will almost never see a rejection. Write the post for a customer, not to game the machine, and it clears. ## Measure what your posts actually do You do not need a spreadsheet. Your Business Profile has a Performance section, sometimes called insights, that shows what people did after finding you: calls, website clicks, direction requests, and how they found the listing. Watch the weeks you post an Offer against the quiet weeks. If a "Tuesday 20 percent off" Offer lifts calls on Mondays and Tuesdays, that is your answer, and your cue to run it again. Let the numbers pick your posts. The ones that drive calls and clicks are the ones to repeat; the ones that do nothing, drop. To fold this into a wider local plan, the [guide to promoting your business locally](/blog/how-to-promote-your-business-locally) pairs posts with the offline and online moves that compound over time. ## Frequently asked questions ### How long does a Google Business Profile post stay visible? A standard post shows on your listing until it ages out. Google's documentation says posts older than six months are automatically archived unless you set a date range on the post. That is why a steady posting habit matters: it keeps fresh updates in the visible slot instead of leaving it blank. ### How many characters can a Google Business Profile post be? According to Semrush's guide, a post allows up to 1,500 characters of text. You almost never want to use them all. The first line does the work, so lead with the offer or news and keep the rest short. ### Do I have to pay to post on my Google Business Profile? No. Posts are a free feature of every Google Business Profile. The only cost is the few minutes it takes to write one, and scheduling recurring posts brings even that down to about an hour a month. ### What is the difference between an Update, an Offer, and an Event? An Update is general news or a photo. An Event has a start and end date, like a sale weekend or a class. An Offer is a deal with dates and a time, and Google's documentation notes it automatically adds a "View Offer" button, which makes it the best type for driving action. Posts will not carry your ranking on their own, but they turn a static listing into one that looks open, busy, and worth the call, and that is what wins the customer who is already looking. Do the small thing on a schedule: one real offer, one good photo, one clear button, a couple of times a month. That steady local presence is exactly the kind of quiet, repeatable work Fonzy keeps running for owners who would rather be in the shop than in the dashboard. ## Sources - [Google Business Profile Help: post types, the six-month archive rule, recurring scheduling, and why a phone number in the description gets a post rejected](https://support.google.com/business/answer/7342169?hl=en) - [Semrush: the 1,500-character text limit on Google Business Profile posts](https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-business-profile-posts/) - [BrightLocal (Claire Carlile): the feature's 2017 rollout and the lodging industry gaining access in 2021](https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/google-business-profile-google-posts-updates/) --- Published by [Fonzy](https://www.fonzy.ai) — expert articles that get you found on Google and AI search.