Google Business Profile Posts: Are They Worth the Effort?
If you’ve set up a Google Business Profile, you’ll have noticed a button tucked away in the dashboard called Add update. Most business owners click it once, write something, and never go back.
That’s understandable — it isn’t obvious what a post is for, or whether it does anything. So here’s the honest version: Google Business Profile posts are not a ranking silver bullet, and anyone telling you they are is selling something. What they are is free space on a page your customers are already looking at, and right now that space is probably blank.
What a Google Business Profile post actually is
A post is a short update — a bit of text, usually a photo, and a button — that appears on your profile when someone finds you in Google Search or Google Maps. It sits below your reviews and photos, under a heading like “Updates” or “From the owner”.
There are three main types:
| Type | What it’s for | How long it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Update | General news — a finished job, a new service, a seasonal reminder | Stays on the profile, but drops down the list as newer posts arrive |
| Offer | A specific deal, with a start and end date | Shows until the end date you set |
| Event | Something happening on a date — an open day, a market stall, a class | Shows until the event date passes |
All three are free. All three take about five minutes with a photo from your phone. And all three let you add a button — Learn more, Call now, Book — which is where the useful bit lives, because that button can point at a page on your own website.
How long do Google Business Profile posts last?
This is the question people search for most, and the answer is different for each type.
Offers and events are tied to their dates. Set an offer to end on the 30th and it disappears on the 30th, which is exactly what you want — no customer ringing up in November about an August special.
Standard updates don’t get deleted, but they don’t stay prominent either. Newer posts push older ones down the list, and after a while an old update stops appearing in the main view of your profile at all. Treat roughly six months as the useful life of one and you won’t go far wrong.
The practical takeaway: this is a habit, not a job you finish. One post a month, every month, beats ten posts in a fortnight followed by two years of silence. A profile that visibly stopped two years ago tells a customer something you’d rather it didn’t.
Why your posts aren’t showing
If you’ve written a post and can’t see it on your profile, it’s almost always one of these.
Your profile isn’t verified. An unverified profile doesn’t display publicly at all, so nothing you add to it will show either. If you never finished verification — the video call, the postcard, the recorded walk-round of your premises or van — that’s the first thing to fix. Our step-by-step Google Business Profile guide walks through it.
Your profile is suspended. Rarer, but it happens, usually after a change to the business name or address that Google didn’t like. You’d normally have had an email about it.
The post is still under review. New posts go through automated checks before they appear. Give it a few hours before assuming something’s broken.
The post breached the content rules. This one catches people out. Google doesn’t allow phone numbers in the body text of a post — your number belongs in the profile itself, not in an update. Posts also get rejected for reading as pure sales shouting, for blocks of capitals, and for photos that are blurry, watermarked or plastered with text. Rewrite it as a normal sentence a human would actually say, and it usually goes through.
You’re checking while signed in as the owner. The owner view and the customer view aren’t identical. Look on your phone, signed out, or in a private browsing window.
Post ideas that don’t feel like adverts
The hard part isn’t the posting, it’s thinking of something to say. For a trade or a local shop, these work:
- A job you’ve just finished. A photo of the finished bathroom, fence or haircut, one line about what it involved, and roughly where. This is the single best type of post for a tradesperson.
- A seasonal reminder. Boiler servicing before the cold sets in. Gutters before autumn. Getting the garden straight before spring. Genuinely useful to the reader, and it happens to be what you sell.
- Opening hours changes. Bank holidays, a week off, late nights in December. Exactly the sort of thing customers go looking for.
- A new service, or new kit. No fanfare needed — just “we now do X”.
- A thank-you for a review. Nice for the customer who left it, and a quiet nudge to everyone else. If getting reviews is the bit you struggle with, we’ve written separately about how to ask for more Google reviews.
- An answer to a question you’re always asked. “Do you cover Tenterden?” “Do you take card?” If three people have asked you this month, post it.
Keep them short — two or three sentences is plenty. Write the way you’d speak to someone standing in front of you. And use a photo you took yourself; a real picture of your own work beats a stock image every time.
The part that catches people out
Every post wants somewhere to send the person who’s interested. That’s what the button is for — and it needs a page to point at.
This is where posts and a website stop being separate things. A post about a bathroom refit that links through to your bathrooms page gives someone a reason to keep reading. A post with no link asks them to remember your name and start again later, which they won’t. It’s the same argument we make when people ask whether a Google Business Profile is enough on its own: the profile gets you found, the website is where people decide.
Here’s where we declare our interest — we build websites, so of course we think you should have one. If you’re a new business with nothing to link to, our team designs and builds you a site free from your Google Business Profile, with hosting at £24 a month including VAT as the only cost, and no minimum term. You can read exactly how that works and make your own mind up.
So — are they worth it?
Yes, with realistic expectations.
Posting won’t drag you up the map results on its own. The things that move that needle are your categories, your reviews, your service area and your consistency across the web, all of which we cover in our guide to local SEO for small businesses. What posting does is fill space on a page customers already visit, show the business is alive, and give you somewhere to point people.
Five minutes a month. It’s about the cheapest marketing you’ll ever do.