Related: The Google Business Profile section most businesses fill out once and forget
Every time I look through local profiles in this part of Toronto, I check the Updates tab. It is the fastest way to tell whether anyone is actually tending a profile or whether it was set up once and abandoned.
The results are consistent. Most profiles have never posted. Of the ones that have, a good number stopped somewhere between six months and three years ago, usually right after somebody set the profile up and felt enthusiastic about it for a fortnight.
This is strange, because a Google Post is space inside your own search result that costs nothing and that you fully control.
What a post actually is
When someone searches your business by name, or finds you in the map pack and taps through, they land on your profile. A post appears there, in the Updates section, with an image, some text, and optionally a button.
That is real estate inside a Google result. You are not bidding for it. You are not competing for it. It is attached to your profile and it is either filled or empty.
Posts expire from prominent display after a while, which is the part that trips people up. That is why a profile with one post from 2024 looks worse than you would think. The tab is not empty, but nothing in it is current.
Additionally, a dormant Updates tab is one of the signals a customer reads without meaning to. Somebody deciding between two clinics glances at both profiles. One has a note from last week about a new practitioner. The other has nothing since the pandemic. Neither of those is a ranking factor exactly. However, one of them gets the phone call.
What actually gets engagement
I want to be careful here, because most advice on this is people guessing. What I can say is what the pattern looks like across the profiles I have watched, and what plainly does not work.
Specific and time bound does better than general. "We have appointments open Thursday and Friday this week" outperforms "Book your appointment today." The first one is information. The second one is a slogan.
Photos of the actual place and actual people do better than stock. This is not a subtle difference. A slightly imperfect photo of your own counter beats a polished stock image of somebody else's counter, because the person looking is trying to work out what your place is like.
Answering a real question does well. If three customers a week ask whether you take walk ins, whether there is parking behind the building, or whether you can do a repair on a specific model, that is a post. You have already established there is demand for the answer.
Anything that reads like an advertisement does poorly. The Updates tab is not where people go to be sold to. They are already on your profile, which means they are already considering you. The job of a post is to make deciding easier, not to convince a stranger from nothing.
How often to post
The honest answer for a small business is less often than the advice usually says, and more consistently.
You will read that you should post weekly. For a business with one or two people running it, weekly is a commitment that gets dropped in month two, and a profile that posted weekly then stopped dead looks worse than one that never started.
What I would actually aim for is two posts a month, on a schedule you can hold during a busy week. Once a fortnight is enough to keep the tab looking current. It is also few enough that you are not scraping around for something to say, which is when the filler starts.
The thing to protect is consistency rather than volume. Twenty four posts spread evenly across a year does more for you than forty posts crammed into three enthusiastic months followed by nine months of silence.
How this shows up in clicks
I want to be careful not to overclaim. I have not run a controlled test, and anybody who tells you posts move you up the map pack by a fixed amount is inventing a number.
What is easier to reason about is what happens after someone reaches your profile. At that point they are comparing. A profile with something recent on it reads as a business that is open, staffed, and paying attention. A profile with nothing recent reads as a question mark, and some proportion of people resolve a question mark by going elsewhere.
You can watch some of this yourself. The profile performance section in Google Business Profile shows views, searches, calls, and direction requests over time. If you start posting on a fortnightly rhythm, look at calls and direction requests two or three months later rather than next week. The numbers are noisy at small volumes, so a single week tells you nothing.
On the other hand, the reviews side of this is better documented, and the two work together. A profile with recent posts and recent reviews is a profile that looks alive from every angle a customer checks.
What to post when there is nothing to promote
This is the real blocker. Most small businesses do not have a promotion running, so they conclude they have nothing to post, and the tab stays empty.
Things that are not promotions and work fine:
- A photo of something you finished this week, with a sentence about what it involved.
- The answer to a question you keep getting asked.
- A seasonal note. What changes about your work in winter, what to check before spring, when you get busiest and how far ahead to book.
- A small operational fact. New hours, a new payment method, parking that changed, a staff member who joined.
- Something you fixed that was unusual, described plainly and without naming the customer.
- A short explanation of a decision customers ask about. Why you use one material over another, why a repair sometimes costs more than expected.
None of that requires a sale, a campaign, or a marketing budget. It requires noticing that the ordinary parts of your week are information other people do not have.
If it helps, keep a note on your phone. Whenever a customer asks something twice, write it down. That note becomes your posting queue and you will never again sit down wondering what to say.
The free check on this site flags whether your profile looks active or looks abandoned, which is a reasonable place to start if you are not sure how yours reads to someone seeing it for the first time.
What keeps striking me about posts is that this is not a hard or expensive thing that small businesses are losing on. It is a free slot inside their own search result, and it sits empty because filling it never becomes urgent.
So the question I would ask is this. If you opened your own Updates tab right now, what is the date on the most recent thing in there, and what would a stranger conclude from it?