Google has been making efforts to let business owners—including law firm partners—easily advertise their business online. One of those efforts has been Google My Business, which allows verified owners (like a partner) of eligible businesses (like a law firm) quickly create a page that interested search engine users can interact with.
Among the features that Google My Business includes is the ability to write posts about your law firm. But just because you can write posts does not necessarily mean that it’s worth it. We wanted to know if these Google My Business posts helped websites rank higher in targeted searches by increasing their search engine optimization (SEO).
Here’s what we found.
There’s Not a Lot of Information About the SEO Impact of Google My Business Posts
The first thing we found was that there wasn’t much to find: Search engines develop quickly, rapidly rolling out new features and opportunities only to drastically change and tweak them and then, all too often, cut much of the feature away. This cycle often takes less than a year, leaving online marketing professionals little time to properly test a feature to determine how, exactly, it can work for businesses interested in using it to promote their brand.
The posts feature on Google My Business pages is a perfect example.
Originally rolling out June, 2014, Google My Business has developed rapidly, adding and subtracting features quickly over the next few years. One feature that got added during the summer of 2017 was the ability to write posts—mini-blogs of less than 300 words—for your law firm’s page in the results.
In such a short amount of time, online marketers have only publicized one case study, which only involved two websites. It was also conducted August through October of 2017—the early days of Google My Business posts—so there is the definite possibility that the posts feature has evolved significantly enough to make the case study stale. Nevertheless, other information on the posts aspect of Google My Business is even older: The feature got a lot of play when it first rolled out, but has since fallen by the wayside.
Not Much Evidence of an SEO Boost from Google My Business Posts, Directly
While the case study proclaims that “Google Posts… have a mild impact on ranking,” even a casual scrutiny reveals this claim to be misleading.
In one of the websites covered by the case study, the statistics were clear: The posts were driving a significant amount of traffic to the site. Web traffic is one of the more powerful SEO factors out there, so attributing the site’s small rise in the rankings to the Google My Posts is misleading—while the posts drove the traffic, it was likely the traffic that drove the rankings jump. The Google My Business posts were not directly responsible.
The other website covered in the case study made a significant jump in the first page, something that made the case study author relied heavily on when she made her conclusion. However, much of that rankings jump was because Google combined three duplicative pages in the results above the case study’s website. Accounting for those three listings condensed into one, much of the rankings spike evaporated.
Web Traffic is SEO, Too
However, just because Google My Business posts do not seem to score on the SEO front, on their own, it does not mean they do not contribute to your site’s ranking, indirectly.
One of the reliable findings from the case study was that the posts were bringing traffic to the website by placing quick microblogs into a prominent place on the results page. Those readers helped increase the SEO of the site by sending Google signals that the site was relevant and important to whatever search they had conducted, boosting the site’s rankings.
Therefore, in an indirect way, using Google My Business’ posts feature can be a nice way to build your legal blog’s readership which can, if successful, turn into SEO points from the increase in web traffic.
Here’s Where We Pitch for Legal Blogs
What’s a quick and easy way to produce content for your Google My Business posts? Write a legal blog or hire our professional legal blog writers. You can easily repurpose the content you are already producing for your blog for your Google My Business blog posts, too.