 Hey everybody, Cyrus here. All right, Joy Hawkins. Why is Joy Hawkins one of my favorite SEOs? Okay. One, she and her agency run lots of SEO experiments. A lot of agencies just do best practices based on other agencies. They actually do their own original research and they share it across the industry so we can all learn from it. Her agency, Sterling Sky, is one of the best local SEO agencies that you can hire. Also, Joy is just a really nice person. If you've ever met her, she is freaking fantastic, a great person to talk to. Local SEO changes a lot and because local packs and Google My Business, visibility isn't always the same as doing traditional SEO. Joy's title is called To Post or Not To Post, what we learned from analyzing over 1,000 Google Post. Please enjoy listening to Joy Hawkins. I don't know about the rest of you, but when the lockdown first started last year, I started to develop a lot of new hobbies. One of those hobbies was that I decided to start playing video games against colleagues of mine and people in the local SEO industry. We played twice a week and one of the games that we played quite regularly was Mario Kart. It got some traction. A bunch of people joined and started playing. Garrett Sussman actually referred to us on Twitter as the local SEO underground Mario Kart League. It was a lot of fun, but it's important to note that when we first started a year ago, I was really terrible at this game. I had a colleague named Dave and he liked to point out constantly how terrible I was at it. In comparison to how great he was, and he actually was tasked last year at our Sterling Sky Christmas party, he had to do an award show. He decided to name me the best gamer as a joke, and he actually set up this website, which is still live today, to essentially highlight our scores to show that I sucked and he was great. He was like a screenshot as an example. Now anyone that knows me even a little bit, knows that I'm insanely competitive. I decided this is not going to fly. I was not okay with Dave stating that basically I would never beat him, so I decided to make it my new year's resolution and quickly got to work. I started practicing, playing a lot against myself, just trying to learn and get better, but I found that I was just continuously coming a little short of beating Dave. I get close, but not quite there. That's when my work self kicked in, and I was trying to figure out, okay, Joy, if this was a problem at work, how would you tackle this? And I decided that if I wanted to beat Dave, I needed more than just like randomly practicing. I needed an actual strategy. So that strategy in my mind was I needed to figure out which races that I continually lost at, and which races I was good at, and that way I could kind of figure out which ones I needed to practice more. And so what I did, is I actually started logging this into a spreadsheet. And yes, I literally have this spreadsheet, still updated to this day. And every time we play, I would record our scores. And it was really shocking, to be honest, because things that I thought I was really good at, turned out I was actually terrible at. And on the contrary, Dave would actually vote all the time for races that he was actually really terrible at and had no idea. So it's kind of interesting to see that the data actually showed something different than what I kind of thought in my head. So it helped me formulate a strategy so that I could actually practice the ones that I was continuously losing at, get better at them, and then hopefully beat Dave. So this strategy did work only a couple of weeks in. I beat him not only once, but twice that week. And since then, I now beat him a lot more than he beats me. So I'm not just telling you this story because I want you all to think that I'm this like giant nerd. This strategy that I used to actually figure out how to beat Dave or how to win there, is actually the same strategy that we used with this study that we did on Google posts. So the study that I'm gonna be going into, we did it on a thousand different Google posts for various clients of ours, various industries. And similar to the Mario Kart sheet, we logged all of the data in a spreadsheet, pulled stuff in from Google My Business Insights, from Google Analytics, and we were able to break it down and categorize it and look at it the way that we wanted to. Now just have to give a quick shout out. I did not do this study alone. I got help from several of my brilliant colleagues. So I wanna give them credit there. And I also just wanna touch on a few disclaimers. So one of the things to keep in mind is that this data set only had a total of 36 conversions. So 36 is not a lot, but the reason why it's so low is in order to actually track and attribute a conversion to a Google post, it's kind of annoying. First someone has to search your brand on Google. They have to click on one of your Google posts, then go to your website, then convert on your website. And if they don't do that, then it might get attributed to just Google My Business or Organic or something else, because they might just call you directly off the listing or they might click to go to your website, browse around, but not necessarily clicked on the Google posts. So it is really hard to attribute conversions specifically to Google posts. So because of that, we actually had some sets of data where we eliminated the conversion numbers because there just wasn't enough of them. The other kind of caveat was that we wanted to look at Google Analytics data and Google My Business data, but these two do not match. Like we literally had examples where Google Analytics would show like five clicks and Google My Business would show like two. And a little annoying, because I want them to match, I want them to say the same thing, but it's important to know they're just tracking different things and they're not going to match. So I'm not gonna get into the nuances of why that is. It's just kind of important to keep in mind. Now getting into the study, there was a bunch of different questions we wanted to answer around Google posts. And one of the first ones is I really wanted to know if there was any patterns across the different types of Google posts. So if you're not familiar with the four different types of Google posts, I'm gonna cover them and just explain how they work. The first type is called offer posts. Now these are kind of fancier. They have this little button on them. They also have an icon at the top that's in yellow that kind of highlights them as an offer and they usually are designed to have a call to action. So this is an example of one and what they look like. On these types of posts, you can actually set the date range inside Google My Business to show Google how long you want it to stay live for. The second type are called COVID posts. So these were new as of last year and what is so interesting about these is that they have a completely different placement in the knowledge panel. So typically posts are shoved down to the very bottom of the page, below reviews, below questions and answers, below products, like below all these features that Google has, but COVID posts actually show like right at the top, right below your business information. So they are significantly higher and they have a lot more exposure. Now the downside to them is that if you do a COVID post, first of all, it causes all your other posts not to show. So that's kind of a bummer. But second, there are no images. So it is a text only thing. It's kind of meant to be a really short, small message that you wanna get out there. Now, they also are really visible on the Google Maps app. So that's another place that they would get more visibility in comparison to any of the post types. So as you can see here, before even clicking or expanding on the business, you actually see the COVID post highlight right at the top here. COVID posts, you can't dictate how long you want them to stay live for. They automatically stay live for 28 days. The third type is event posts. So these are really similar to offer posts in the way that they function. You can set the date range that the post stays live. You have an image. It's really honestly quite similar just without the little icon that they offer posts have. And then the fourth type is what I call update posts. And if you're unfamiliar with this term, I made it up. Wasn't sure what to call this type of post because inside the dashboard in one section it's like update and then another section it's like what's new? And there really wasn't like a good name for it. So I had to call it something. So we just went with update posts. And this is the traditional type of Google post. So when Google first launched this feature these used to stay live for seven days. And then after seven days they would kind of disappear. And if you can see it like the very bottom right of this screenshot, it would say like view more posts at the bottom. However, this changed as of this year. Now Google is actually keeping these on your knowledge panel for up to six months. So literally if you posted something six months ago never posted again, it would stay up there for six months. Now how I figured this out, it's not actually anywhere in Google's help center but it was bugging me. I really wanted to know how long they stayed live for. So I found one that a business that only had a single post and I tracked it daily every single day to check to see when it disappeared. And I tracked it down to the number of days. So if you want the number of days, it's actually 183 days. Six months is easier to remember. But the math on that it's actually 30.5 days for six months. So that is how long your post will stay live for if you were to do a single update type post. And then of course after, while the six months is going on it would look like this with the images and posts showing. And after the six month period it would kind of get hidden like that first example. Now when we looked at all the different posts that we were tracking and we looked to see what type was better there were definitely two that stood out and performed better than the other two. So offer posts and COVID posts as you can see highlighted in green here got more clicks according to Google Analytics and Google my business insights in comparison to the other two types. But there was a part of me that wondered because I was like, you know, when we did this study it was 2020 and those update posts were only staying live for seven days. So theoretically speaking maybe the other types just performed better because they were up longer and they got more views. So I went back and I added this data in and I decided to figure out like an average click-through rate based on views and clicks. And even with that factored in offer posts still went they still perform better. They get a higher click-through rate they get more activity in comparison to update posts. So the views thing wasn't really true. Now getting into the specifics of what you should include in your Google posts first thing I looked at was suffer on text content. So I wanted to know, is it a good idea to make sure that the post has a title on it? So here's an example of a post with a title and a post without the title. It's an optional thing and you can kind of see they look slightly different. Well, the data showed us that having a title is definitely better. So if you want more clicks make sure you fill in that field. We wanted to know, okay, if you do have a title should it be in all caps or should it be capitalized normally? So an all caps post kind of looks like this. So obviously drawing attention you may argue that it's shouting at you. But when we looked at it all caps was not the way to go. So capitalize your titles normally. Next we wanted to look at emojis. And I realized emojis are one of those things that people either love or hate. So some people think they're awesome and some people think they're tacky. I wanted to know what the data said, you know, does having posts like this with colorful little fun emojis help people click on them or is it just gimmicky? And for those of you that love emojis you'll be happy to know that emojis actually did help clicks. Posts with emojis had almost double the clicks that posts without emojis had. So use those emojis and make sure you include them in there. Next we wanted to look at stuff around the image of the post. We wanted to know what types of images performed better. So the first thing we looked at was text in the image. So often we'll see images where there's like a label or something that kind of highlights a call to action or something like that. So in this example on the left it says free estimates but that's actually part of the image. Whereas the right there's no text there at all. So when we compare these definitely having text in your image is the way to go. It's kind of larger, gets attention. And you'll see here like definitely way more clicks on the post that had text in the image versus ones without. Next we wanted to look at stock photos. So I realized this topic is definitely not specific to Google posts. People often want to know how stock photos perform across lots of things. So hopefully this is interesting for you guys. What we defined as a stock photo was something where we're literally pulling it off stock photo resources but we're not even modifying it the least bit. So on the right hand side, I think like that original image of the pumpkin was technically a stock photo but then we added a whole bunch of stuff to it to make it unique. So we didn't classify that as a stock photo. So comparing these ones that were just flat out with stock photos, stock photos did not perform well, so this did not surprise me. But definitely if you want to get better performing Google posts, don't go the easy approach of just using stock photos. Try and use original images or customized images so that they better fit your business. Next we wanted to look at logos. So logos are another thing that brands often like to throw in their images to kind of make them more related to their brand. So here's an example, that's the image there and you'll see that there's actually the logo up at the top there. And when we looked at this, there was actually no clear pattern. So if you want to use your logo, go for it. And if you don't, don't. Doesn't really matter either way. So the next section was around what types of things that you should be posting about. So this is a question I get a lot on webinars. People are like, I want to utilize Google posts but I'm not really quite sure what I'm supposed to be posting there. Like what types of things do consumers actually care about? So in this section, we had a lot of different types that we categorized. Not going to be going through all of them. I am simply going to be highlighting the winners and the losers. So the ones that performed the worst and the ones that performed the best. So I'm going to start with the best. In third place, we have posts that highlight a sense of urgency. So in this example here, you know, this is a dentist talking about same day appointments. If you've ever had tooth pain, you know that that is not something you want to wait on. You want to see somebody immediately to get rid of that pain. So any posts that had a sense of urgency fell into this category. We had 25 in our set that matched this and they averaged 2.68 clicks each. The second place winner was posts that included calls to action. So sometimes the call to action was like a part of the image. Sometimes it was a button or like in the title. But either way, anyone that had a call to action in it, we included in this section. We had 350 of these in our set and they averaged 2.73 clicks each. And then the winner for the best performing type of post was specials. So this wasn't shocking to me really. Like if you're offering a customer an incentive or some way to save the money, of course they're going to care about that. So in this example, you know, even something small like $10 off an oil change would help performance. So think about, you know how you can incorporate this type of stuff into your business, any type of free thing you can offer a bundle. The cool thing is about this one, we had 52 of these, but like the average clicks was double the second and third place runner ups. So like that's quite substantial. So you can kind of see here in comparison, they averaged six clicks each versus like less than three. So definitely something that you want to utilize Google posts for. Now onto the losers. Now coming back to what I was saying originally about data, you know with the Mario Kart spreadsheet when I started logging things, it surprised me. Like what I thought in my head was not actually reality. And that's exactly what happened here. Like there are types coming up here that I would be honest. I was not expecting them to perform the worst. So the interesting to see if you get the same kind of reaction tied for third worst was who we are or bios. So these are like informative, you know learn about our company. Here's, you know where this person went to school or some award they won. We classified these as bios and they did not do super well. They had an average of one click each. We had 105 of these that matched. Tied for third place were posts about products or services. This is really common with like car dealers and some of those industries that have products. They like to post, you know about their products. These posts didn't perform nearly as well either. So we had 210 of them. They averaged one click each. This is one that surprised me. Seasonal content did not perform very well. So you would think or I thought anyway that having, you know a post that highlights things about Christmas when it's close to Christmas would, you know, resonate with people and get them excited. It didn't seem to have that effect. So we had 36 of these that didn't even get a click each and did not perform well. And then the absolute worst in our study was post about reviews. So this is actually something I remember I like I've heard this come up on webinars where people asked what to post about. And this, you know, cool idea was to hey, take your Google reviews, highlight them, make them bigger put them in an image and use Google posts. And it sounds cool. Like it sounds theoretically like it should work. But overall in our study this was the least likely to get clicks. So we had only 14 of these, not a lot but they averaged 0.71 clicks each. So in summary, here's all the losers in our set. And you know, just always keep in mind that sometimes data helps you make better decisions because what you might think or what you might do does not match what everyone else does. Now I mentioned there were other types of content that I did not have time to get into. So we are gonna be releasing the full study that's gonna outline all the ones in the middle that weren't like the winners and losers as well. So if you wanna get that when it comes out I should hopefully be releasing it in a few weeks and we'll be sending it out in our newsletter, which is free. Now there was another question that I wanted to answer. That study didn't quite answer but I get asked all the time. So this is probably the number one question that I get asked when it comes to Google posts and it's just posting on Google impact ranking. If you're a dog trainer and you wanna rank for dog training do you post about dog training over and over and over again put those keywords in there and then that helps influence your ranking and make you move up. So I wanted to really get an answer to this because I had an answer in my head that I thought was true but I wanted to make sure that I could actually do some case studies and see if that was reality. So we had different candidates for this. I wanted to try and find listings that had like nothing going on. So I wanted to try and make sure these weren't listings that could have an improvement or decrease in ranking because of links they were getting or new content they were adding to their website or new reviews. So none of these candidates had any of that stuff. Two were for marketing companies and one was for a physical therapist and really importantly they were in small towns. So if there was any movement we wanted to make sure we were able to measure it even if it was like a small movement. What we did is we went into DBA platform which is a tool that allows you to schedule posts in advance which was kind of cool because you can't do that natively inside the Google My Business dashboard. So to save myself some time we scheduled nine weeks of posts in advance one a week and then using Placescout as a rank tracker we tracked a total of 441 keywords per location. And I wanted to really see a large picture here and we were tracking rankings in the top 10 but we were specifically only tracking local PAC rankings so not organic. So for the first one, the physical therapy business you'll see the before and after is almost identical. Of course guys keep in mind like always there is fluctuations in search results and like there is ranking going up and down for no reason at all really. It's just the natural way that things happen. And I mean I don't say no reason at all it's probably your competitors that are doing things to influence it but you're never gonna see 100% consistent numbers. So this was like not a big difference enough to worry about thinking that this meant the posts were actually impacting something. The second one this was for one of the marketing companies and this one actually took a hit which was kind of interesting. So you'll see the rankings were stable and then all of a sudden there's this decline and I was like that's weird. Like I would never think that posting would cause a decline so what's going on here? So I did some digging and it's important to note that both the marketing company listings that we were using were actually verified using the same business address. And in December there was an algorithm update and what actually ended up happening was one of the listings stopped showing and the other listing started showing in its place. And this phenomenon if you're not familiar with it is called the filter. So Google does have a filter in place where they filter out businesses that are close by in the same industry. I'm not gonna get into details about this like if you're scratching your head wondering like what I'm talking about. This article kind of details it more but I also talked about it at MozCon two years ago so I don't wanna bore all the people that attended and heard about it then. Now the third one, this was the other marketing listing and this one was choppy which is really strange. Overall between the before and after there was not much of an increase at all and again it wasn't stable like it kept going down and up and so I looked into this one to see like what is causing this shake up? Why are these lines moving up and down? Definitely had nothing to do with posts. What was doing it was that Google could not figure out the intent for this query so they would show a local pack result and then they would show a job pack and then they would show a local pack and it kept going back and forth. So on the days where the local pack disappeared obviously it showed that drop in ranking and then on the days where it was there it showed an increase. So really important kind of note here whenever you're doing these types of studies really important to actually look at the SERPs. So one of the things that I love about Places Scout is they store all the screenshots of what the tracker saw. So I was able to go back and look and see like okay what's actually going on here and conclude that it was not anything I was doing in relation to Google posts it was these other factors that was happening. So in conclusion if you haven't figured it out already my conclusion was that posting has no measurable impact on ranking. So if it is impacting ranking in any way shape or form it is so small that you can't really measure it. So that being said why do you utilize Google posts? Well it's not for ranking keep that in mind but as I mentioned earlier obviously it gets traffic to your website so that's important. But the other thing that I really think is cool about Google posts is this phenomenon called justifications which is another kind of newish term but if you are unfamiliar with it Miriam Ellis did a phenomenal job of writing about it recently on the Moz blog. So absolutely read her article because she's gonna explain it a lot better than I can. But kind of the summary think of it like schema. So you add schema to your website to try and take up more space in the search results and get out more information about your business right. Similarly justifications do that. So when you do a post and it includes keywords that are related to the search term that was typed in Google will sometimes highlight and grab a section of the Google posts and stick it right in the search results. So one of the things we found with this study that was kind of cool is that Google will actually prioritize what posts they pull from based on the date. So back in December it was showing information from like the post I had done three days ago but then when I searched again in January it's now showing the post from January. So if you have a newer post that matches the query they will pull that instead. And how far back they look is 60 days. So this is another thing that again wasn't outlined anywhere in Google's help center. We had to track it and figure it out ourselves. But if you want justifications you basically have to make sure you're posting at least ones every 60 days. And they look cool. Like I would click on that. Other things we learned that I thought you might wanna hear about. One of the things unfortunately that we confirmed was that Google My Business Insights do include traffic from ranked trackers. So this graph here, those like giant spikes in views. Remember how I said I was tracking 441 keywords? Well we had our tracker run once a week and it's very obvious what days the tracker ran because those are the giant spikes that you see there on the graph. So I hate this but it is a fact that you need to be aware of as marketers we are actually skewing all the data we look at when we run ranked trackers which is frustrating. It's also not just in that graph the search queries inside Google My Business Insights. This was even more frustrating for me because these are supposed to be unique visitors. So I don't know how one ranked tracker is getting counted as multiple times but it is getting counted multiple times because the queries that showed up at the top as the most searched queries are definitely not the most searched queries. They were the queries that were exactly matched what I had on my ranked tracker. And I know they're not the most searched queries but I specifically chose like really long-tailed keywords and I'm like, nobody's gonna search these but there's low competition for them. And yeah, they show at the top as now having a high search volume thanks to my ranked tracker. Another kind of quick tidbit is that the average CTR in our study was 0.5%. So think about this. If you are utilizing Google posts you do wanna make sure that your listings are getting a certain number of views if you were gonna get any clicks because you need about 200 views before you're gonna get one click. Now this might come into play for let's say you are a hospital and you've got 200 practitioner listings for all the doctors and you're like, well, do I really want to come up with a unique post for each one of my doctor's listings? Well, we find usually practitioner listings get a lot less views. They're not as well viewed on Google. They generally aren't optimized or worked on as much. So you'll see here like our practitioner listings that we had in our set, way less views than the listing for the office. And because of this, obviously they're gonna get less clicks. So keep that in mind. If you're trying to come up with a strategy really utilize posts on listings that get a lot of views because you'll get the best bang for your buck there. We also learned a bit about tracking. I'm not gonna dive into this for the sake of time. I wrote about it, but definitely if you're not really sure how to track posts in Google analytics I came to some conclusions on how to do this the best using UTM codes so that you can actually figure out which exact post it came from. So if you're not sure on that, check out that article and explains more in detail. Now good news, if you weren't furiously jotting down notes I actually do have a summary recap here that you can just download. So if you want to know which strategies to utilize with Google posts here's a summary of all the winning strategies. And I can't believe I actually was able to get this bitly but MozCon 2021 go there and you'll be able to download this and you can print it out, tape it on your wall just remember it next time you're doing Google posts and keep in mind if you follow these practices you should be a lot more satisfied with the results of your efforts with Google posts and just because having a data backed strategy will generally result in a lot more success. Thanks so much for listening.