The Google business information is now turning into a small local hub of information for your business. Notably, two new features have been added to Google My Business.

POSTS

Posts allow you to create special events, promotions, coupons and more on your Google listing. You can create a post and select a call to action for your visitors. Then publish it and it becomes live on Google. It's not exactly news. In fact, it's something that Google used to have that is coming back. Google has made it extremely simple to use. You can add an image, write your post (100-300 words) and then add a button (call to action). The button currently has five associated calls to action: Learn more, Reserve, Sign up, Buy or Get Offer.  Each of these gets associated with a landing page that you designate.

WEBSITE

You might think this newly added feature was the ability to add a link to your website. Well, no. You can already do that. Website lets you create a FREE WEBSITE on Google. Since part of my job is web developer I should be quaking in my boots but when you see the result you see that most small businesses will need and want more. That's not to say that this free website feature isn't useful. In fact, we've already been building customer SECOND sites on this platform. Why not? It's free. You can use it to create inbound links to your actual business site. More to come on whether that will be beneficial to your SEO but for now try to find a useful reason to use it EVEN IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A BUSINESS WEBSITE. We like the idea of creating product pages or promotional pages using the FREE SITE. Why not? It's FREE!

Did I say it was FREE? Yup it's free. : )