What a fortnight of Google Business Profile posts taught us
We turned ad hoc Business Profile posting into a tagged post bank for both AHA centres. Three readings later, we had to correct our own claim about how long a post keeps earning.
The problem
Business Profile posting was ad hoc, and one early reading looked like a long tail.
The solution
A tagged post bank on a fixed cadence, read three times before the plan changed.
A Google Business Profile post earns its views in about two weeks and then stops dead. I know because we first wrote down the opposite, and a third reading proved it wrong.
Where it started
AHA has two experience centres in Mumbai, Santacruz West and Lower Parel, and each has its own Business Profile. Until mid-September, posting to them was ad hoc. On 9 September the plan still listed the profiles as unstarted.
A post bank, not a habit
From 15 September, posting ran from a bank instead of memory:
- One description per article, rewritten for curiosity. Each opens on a specific, sometimes surprising claim from the article and holds back the answer. All sit well under Google’s 1,500-character limit.
- One tagged link per post, used on both centres, with the publish date in
utm_content. Clicks are attributable in GA4 instead of landing as unknown traffic. - Both centres, every time, using Google’s own “Copy post” dialog.
- A fixed cadence: Monday and Thursday, with Friday added a week later. Mumbai and buying-intent articles go first, and no two posts in a row share a topic.
- A photo of the post’s own topic, never a logo card, exported as JPG because Business Profile won’t accept the site’s AVIF images. The photos prepared on 28 September, for example, were two JPGs: one for the retrofit article and one for TV-unit wall planning.
?utm_source=gbp&utm_medium=post
&utm_campaign=blog/&utm_content= The bank fell behind once, with descriptions for 19 of 30 published articles, because writing one was a separate task nobody had queued. Writing it is now a standing step in the Claude Code skill that publishes articles, so it happens in the same session a post ships.
Google declined our Business Profile API application automatically, so the readings came from screenshots of the profiles.
The claim we got wrong
The first four posts went up on 16 September. Between the first reading (day 5) and the second (day 15), their combined views rose 93%. On 1 October the log called it a long tail, “GBP posts keep earning for weeks”, and the plan was to work through every older article on that basis.
The third reading, on 6 October, said otherwise:
- Six of seven posts gained nothing in five days.
- The first four went from +93% in ten days to 0% in the next five. Not slower growth: identical numbers. That’s a plateau, not a reporting lag.
The 93% was real. It was just the end of the fortnight, and we had read the last of a curve as a trend.
The exception that explains it
One post kept climbing: an article on October heat in Mumbai, posted in late September. It rose 38% in five days while everything else was flat. A Diwali post from the same week went out about seven weeks before the festival. Same effort, same format, and the October post had nearly four times the views. The only difference was whether the topic was live when it went out.
What changed
- Cadence still matters, for a duller reason. Each post is a one-off that earns for about two weeks, so value grows with the number of posts, not with time.
- Season is the biggest multiplier. Festive posts go out when the festival is close. The Diwali article is scheduled for a re-post on 2 November, and that’s the main event, not a tidy-up.
- Re-posting a good evergreen article every couple of months is now a tactic worth testing, because the first post has provably stopped earning.
- Size it honestly. Twelve posts in three weeks make a useful supporting channel, not a main line.
Still open
The profiles themselves aren’t at 100% yet. A phone number added to the Lower Parel profile on 22 September still wasn’t showing in Google’s public data a month later, and the Friday review-request habit is still on the open list. That matters more than any single post: on commercial searches, the Santacruz listing averages position 3, where the homepage averages 16.
Rules I took from it
- Read a channel three times before calling a trend. Two points make a line; three show its shape.
- Identical numbers mean a plateau, not a lag.
- Post in season. Timing beat everything else we controlled.
- Tag every link, or the visits belong to nobody.