Your Google Business Profile is often the first and only page a local searcher reads. Posts are the part of it most businesses abandon first, usually after two enthusiastic weeks in the spring. A simple monthly rhythm is easier to keep than inspiration, and it keeps the profile showing recent activity instead of a last update from a year ago.
What a post can and cannot do
A post is a short update attached to your profile: a few sentences, an image, an optional call to action, and usually a link. It appears to people who found you in search or on the map, and it stays visible for a period before Google moves it into the less prominent archive.
It will not fix a wrong category, missing hours, or a thin review count. Those are the structural fields that decide whether you appear at all. Treat posts as the layer that demonstrates you are active and gives a searcher a reason to choose you over the next listing, not as a substitute for the fundamentals.
Week one: a service spotlight
Pick one service you want more of and describe it in plain language. What problem does it solve, who is it for, and what happens when someone calls. Add a clear photo of that work if you have one, and link to the matching page on your website rather than the homepage.
Write like a person, not a brochure. One sentence about the problem, one about how you handle it, and a call to action. If you cannot say why the service matters in two sentences, that is worth fixing on the service page before it becomes a post.
Week two: a piece of recent work
Show a job you completed, described in a way that cannot identify the customer. The neighborhood, the type of property, the problem, and the outcome. No addresses, no names, no photos of a home that could be recognized without permission.
Recent work is the most persuasive content a local business has, because it answers the question a searcher is silently asking: have you done this before, near me. It also gives your team something easy to capture, since technicians already take photos for their own records.
Week three: a seasonal or practical tip
Use the calendar honestly. Before the first freeze, what should a homeowner check. Ahead of storm season, which signs mean call now rather than wait. Practical guidance positions you as the person to call and gives people a reason to remember your name before they have an urgent problem.
Avoid reusing generic advice copied from a national site. The value is local specificity: what actually happens to foundations in this soil, what the utility does in this county, how long permits take here. That is the content a search engine cannot write for you.
Week four: an offer or an update
Announce something real. Extended hours for a season, a new team member, new equipment, a maintenance plan, a scheduling window that got shorter. Small, true updates outperform invented promotions and never require you to discount work to say something.
If you use an offer, say the terms clearly and keep them simple enough to explain in one line. Vague urgency wears out quickly with local customers who will see you at the hardware store next month.
Keep the rhythm without thinking about it
Batch the month in one sitting: four short posts, four images, four links. Fifteen minutes of writing and one calendar reminder beats four separate acts of willpower. Save the drafts somewhere your whole team can see them so the people doing the work can suggest next month's topics.
Then leave the rest of the profile alone except for changes that matter: hours, services, phone numbers, holiday closures. Update those the day they change. A perfect post cadence next to wrong hours still sends customers to a competitor.
Images that do the work
A post without a photo is a paragraph competing with a map full of pictures. Use a real image of your own work rather than stock photography: a finished installation, a before-and-after pair, the van parked in front of the property. Keep the subject centered, because thumbnails crop aggressively on phones.
Skip images with text baked into them. They are hard to read at small sizes and the platform cannot index words inside a picture. Put the message in the post copy where it can be read and searched, and let the photo do the job photos are good at, which is showing that the work is real.
How posts fit with the rest of the profile
Think of the profile as four layers. The facts come first: name, hours, category, and contact details. Then services and the descriptions that explain them. Then photos, which carry the most evidence for the least effort. Posts sit on top as the activity layer showing that something changed recently.
If the first three layers are weak, posting will not rescue them. If they are solid, forty-five minutes a month keeps the whole profile looking maintained, and maintenance is precisely what a searcher comparing three similar businesses is quietly evaluating.
Mistakes that waste the effort
The first is the sprint. Four posts in one enthusiastic week, then nothing until the following spring. A profile showing a burst of activity from eight months ago is arguably worse than one showing none, because it reads as a business that tried and stopped.
The second is the repeated offer. The same discount posted weekly stops being news after the second week and trains readers to ignore the profile entirely. If nothing new has happened, a recent job with a good photo is always available and always more interesting than a repeat.
The third is keyword stuffing. Lists of town names, service phrases jammed into a sentence, and exclamation marks standing in for information. Write for the person deciding whether to call, and use the words they would use when they describe the problem to a neighbour.
