A company’s Google Knowledge Panel is a huge driver of success for local businesses, as many companies are becoming aware of and it’s getting more and more valuable daily as the real first point of contact a business – any business – has with a potential customer. It’s your face to the world and your very first impression that can make or break whether or not somebody visits your actual physical location, makes that phone call to your sales rep or even clicks through to your website to learn more. If you are ignoring that window to the world, you are pretty much just giving away your share of the market to your competitors that are not.

You likely already understand the value of Google My Business if you are a local business that thrives on foot traffic or physical geography as key to your business success (restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, locksmiths, tow-trucks, delivery, etc.), but it has value no matter what the business entity. Even global or national businesses can have success with this program if they set it up correctly and understand what KPIs are their targets.

For example, when I launched a certain major city’s Google posts in April 2019, I faced a lot of questions regarding “why” we should do this. What are the required resources, value and expected ROI? How much work will this be? Isn’t Google our competition now that they show content results directly on the SERP? Why give them more content to use on their pages and not our own, etc. How much time will this take? Who else is doing it?

It’s hard for people to do something they have not done before.

There were only a handful of cities and states doing this and I just knew it was a great opportunity that was being offered to destinations and DMOs (destination marketing organizations) at the time (Note to all other DMOs: Sorry, this program has since been discontinued to new entries, but there are still a lot of other Google things that you can do to promote your location.). It was a way to get our own curated content about our brand – the city in this case – in front of eyes that might never find our website or search for those few hundred keywords we optimize for. I signed us up right away.

Can you imagine getting prime grade-A space on a city SERP on Google? FOR FREE*??

This had to happen. And we made it happen.

I knew this was going to be a hugely valuable channel that would have more referral potential, as well as direct-to-consumer curated brand value than any of our other channels, and after many conversations finally got the go-ahead to make it rain. Just by creating short blog post content 5 times a week about the fantastic things this city has to offer on the main city SERP page, we have at this writing delivered over 54 million new views of branded content to those who otherwise would only see the random pages that would come up through the algorithm. This content has become the largest referrer to the website since Covid-19 began – prior it was #2. It has always been the #1 organic referrer since its launch with an over 13% conversion rate at its peak. Currently, it is the highest referrer conversion rate and has been responsible for over 37% of key conversions since April 1, 2020. 

In other words: SUCCESS!

And this is a non-traditional industry. Can you imagine what kind of results you could get immediately in regards to your KPIs on a strictly local business level?

Every company with a Google Knowledge Panel can and should be posting regularly. Whether it’s your business’ offers, events you are putting on or sponsoring, new menu items, new projects your shop is selling – whatever relates to your business that you think will have value to people, you should be using your business’ Google Posts to tell them about it.

Added bonus? It may even show up in somebody’s Discover section of their Android phone without them ever even doing an actual search.

It doesn’t take long to write the posts either. I mean nobody wants to read War and Peace when looking for a really great place for craft cocktails, do they? Just remember, there is no downside and only opportunity to engage more people with your company, shop, or brand and all for just a few short posts a week, so what are you waiting for? Start writing!

*OK, we did have to have somebody write the content, so not entirely for free 😉