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Google Business Profile Optimisation

Case Study

Resort Marketing Strategy with GBP Posts

A resort and spa business, has three golf courses. Their golf pages usually drive a lot of organic traffic to the website in the spring. The main challenge was recovering the traffic (and brand recall) they lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Their three golf courses have separate, optimized local listings on the platform. While they wrote posts for every property, this Google Business Profile case study looks at just one. The other two listings didn’t exist in 2019 and therefore don’t have year-over-year (YOY) data.

Plan and Execution

They started posting weekly GBP updates for the golf courses. Their goal in the beginning was simply to inform customers that the courses were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this case, they knew that keeping the resort’s customers and prospects informed was a priority, even if they weren’t sharing good news. Their posts also provided encouragement and reminded the audience to follow social distancing rules so everyone could be back on the golf course soon. The messages were an indication of thought leadership and empathy, helping shape the brand’s image as responsible and caring.   

Once their golf courses were open again, GBP posts provided the assurance the customers needed to safely play golf. Their messaging highlighted sanitation measures and unique rules on the green to help them and their customers comply with local COVID-19 laws and regulations.

Did It Work?

To analyze results of their strategy, they used Google Business Profile Insights to compare a two-month period in 2019 to the same period in 2020. No GBP posts were posted in 2019; they started posting there at the start of the 2020 period.

Results

They were pleased to see that total search – i.e., the number of times customers found their listing in the local pack, or Maps – went up 15 percent overall. Let’s look at the different types of searches to see how the golf listing performed year-over-year:

• Direct searches increased 78%
• Discovery searches increased 50%
• Search views increased 30%
• Map views increased 2%
• The GBP website link sent 2,900 sessions to the website.
• Standard organic search results sent 1,538 (about half as much as GBP).  

Understanding the Metrics

How did they attribute this organic traffic increase to GBP posts and not something else? First, they always tag the website link in a GBP listing with UTM parameters for the proper source. This listing already had those parameters in place.

They also looked at search data. The number of Direct searches, or branded searches (people looking specifically for this property), was about the same in each time frame we compared. So they knew the posts didn’t help increase branded keyword searches, and it didn’t help the property get more impressions from those searches.

The increased discovery search exposure, however, told them the GBP listing was performing much better for short-tail, non-branded search terms. Conclusion: The GBP posts sent the necessary ranking signals to Google to help their GBP property rank better than it did the year before for category, product or service keywords related to golfing.

This is exactly what they wanted.

Branded search terms make a user’s intent very clear. They already know what they want – and if they want you, you win. The real challenge is ranking better for keywords with general or wide user intent. If someone doesn’t know where they want to play golf, they type the short-tail search query “golf.” They have a much better chance of winning that person’s business when our client outranks the competitors for the query in the local SERP. The time and effort they spent creating GBP posts was an easy win for them, and a version of this strategy still exists on their marketing agenda today.