Pizza Chain Google Posts Case Study

Pizza Chain Google Posts Case Study

Creating a Google My Business profile is just the beginning of running a successful Local SEO campaign. To ensure an increase in ranking, publishing regularly scheduled content to the Google My Business profile is important. Many business owners create their listings and then forget about it. Google and searchers will skip over listings that do not provide consistent engagement with their profile. Recently, a regional pizza chain stopped publishing weekly photos and posts, so the number of map views, phone calls, discovery, website visits, driving directions, and photo views saw a significant decrease as a result.

The Campaign

Pizza Chain is a “fast casual” restaurant with over 200 locations. In September of last year, based on industry-recommended local SEO practices, they began a campaign to publish a weekly post to their Google My Business listings at all locations. Compared to the year before, they saw increases across the board: +65% in discovery searches; +50% in website visits; +32% in map views; +21% in driving directions; +16% in phone calls.

What Happened When They Stopped Posting?

After running a successful campaign, happy with their increases, and wondering if they needed to continue the burdensome task of posting to 200 profiles each week, Pizza Chain decided to test “not posting anymore.” (Their decision was also based on the Google update that moved the Posts section further down in the knowledge panel.) Here’s what happened in one month: map views were slashed to a third; phone calls fell 71%; and website visits diminished by 75%.

Conclusion

When businesses stop publishing weekly updates to the Google My Business profile, there is a sharp decline in key customer impressions. For Pizza Chain, their phone calls, driving directions, and website visits fell to a mere fraction of what they’d been in the period when they were regularly scheduled content. A recent Google Maps search shows that their locations are now barely in the top 20 map results.

Many businesses see the effort that goes into consistently updating their Google My Business profiles as a chore that might not return on the investment. While it’s true that manually updating content for multi-location businesses can require a significant time investment, it’s definitely worth the effort, and now there is a solution to the manual workload. Google My Business automation services can cut down the amount of time needed to upload photos and posts for a fraction of the price it would cost to employ a content team. Dba Platform has automated tools to take the repetition out of the task. Get a demo today!