What to Post on Your GBP Every Week: Trades Businesses

GBP posts show up in the Updates section of your listing, right where a mobile searcher looks before they decide to call. When a homeowner searches "boiler repair near me" and your listing shows a post from three days ago with a photo of a finished repair in their area, you look active and credible. The competitor who hasn't posted since spring looks like they might have packed up.

The honest answer on ranking: Google has not published controlled data showing posts alone push you from position 4 to position 1 in the map pack. What posts do is contribute to the activity and completeness signals Google uses to evaluate local profiles. Google's own guidance frames posts as a way to share timely, relevant updates with local searchers. The more concrete benefit is conversion: three plumbers come up in search, yours has a post from Tuesday showing a fixed leak in the same postcode, yours gets the call.

The Updates section is prime mobile space. If it's empty, your first impression comes from your reviews alone, and you can't control those. You can control whether you have a post up.

One post a week keeps the section filled. Stop posting and you hand that visibility to whoever is still showing up.

Google gives you three post types that matter for trades work. Here's which one to use when.

Offer posts are for time-limited promotions: autumn boiler services, first-time customer discounts, pre-winter heating checks. Offer posts display a "View offer" button directly on your listing before a searcher clicks through. Set a start and end date, write a plain-English description of what the customer gets, and publish. The deadline creates urgency without you writing a word of sales copy. Run an Offer post any time you have a promotion with a genuine end date.

Update posts are the workhorse. Finished jobs, before/after photos, a two-sentence description of what you fixed and where. These expire after 7 days, which is exactly why you need at least one a week, or the Updates section goes blank. A finished job photo from a real local area is the most credible content you can put on your listing: it proves you're local, working, and doing this type of job right now.

Event posts work for anything with a fixed calendar window: a free quote promotion to the end of the month, a seasonal service campaign, a local community event. The event date shows on your listing. You don't need a formal event: "Free drain CCTV survey — August only" set up as an Event post earns a visible date that a plain Update won't show.

Default rule: promotion running → Offer post. Job finished today → Update post. Nothing else → Update post with a job photo.

No copywriting required. This is the exact process:

1. At every job, take a before photo on arrival and an after photo when you finish. Your mobile camera. Thirty seconds.
2. Open Google Maps, find your business listing, tap "Add update."
3. Upload the after photo, or both photos if the contrast tells the story.
4. Write one sentence: "[Service] in [Town] — [what you fixed or replaced]." Example: "Combi boiler replacement in Reading — new A-rated boiler, fitted in a day."
5. Post.

That's the whole system. You don't need a headline or three paragraphs. The before/after of a corroded fitting next to clean copper pipe sells the job better than any caption you could write.

For the photos themselves, see photos that make your GBP posts drive more calls, which covers the framing choices that separate a photo that earns a click from one that gets scrolled past.

Take the photo. Write town + service + one-line outcome. Post. Every job.

One post a week minimum. Rotate services and towns so your post history shows breadth and coverage across your whole area.

Week 1

• Monday Update: "Leak repair in [Town] — ceiling stain traced to a failed joint under the bath. Fixed and dried out same day." Before: stained ceiling. After: repaired joint.
• Thursday Offer (optional): "£50 off any new boiler installation booked before [date]."

Week 2

• Monday Update: "Consumer unit upgrade in [Town] — swapped an old rewireable fuse box for a modern RCD-protected board. Tested and certified." Before and after photos of the board.
• Thursday Update (optional): "Boiler service in [Town] — spotted a failing part early, before it turned into a winter breakdown."

Week 3

• Monday Update: "Drain unblocking in [Town] — cleared a grease-packed kitchen waste two other firms said needed replacing. It didn't."
• Thursday Offer (optional): "Book your boiler service before 1 October — [your current seasonal offer here]."

Week 4

• Monday Update: "Leak detection in [Town] — traced a hidden leak under a solid floor without ripping it all up. Fixed the same visit."
• Thursday Event (optional): "Autumn heating service month — booking October visits now. Get in before the rush."

The formula: town + service + one-sentence outcome + photo. Run it 52 times a year and your post history becomes a local portfolio of real work no new competitor can fake. Post your emergency call-outs too: "2am burst pipe in [Town], fixed before sunrise" is the most credible post you'll ever publish.

Pair your post cadence with a consistent review velocity strategy: the same weekly rhythm that produces posts should trigger a review request after every finished job. Both signals build over time.

Google's GBP content policies cover prohibited post content. Posts flagged as violations get removed immediately; repeated violations can trigger manual review of your entire listing. The categories that catch trades businesses out are listed below. The rule that covers almost every case: post real jobs, describe the work honestly, don't advertise discounts you can't honour, and stay within your trade.

One post a week is the minimum. Two is the cadence that keeps your Updates section continuously filled and builds visible post history fast enough that mobile searchers never see a gap.

The rhythm that sticks: a job completion Update every Monday morning when you review the previous week's work. Add a second post, Offer or Event, on Thursday if anything time-sensitive is running. That's 52 to 104 posts a year with no creative effort.

What happens if you stop: GBP posts expire after 7 days. A blank Updates section is not a documented ranking penalty, but it removes your active-business signal and hands that mobile space to competitors who kept posting. Restarting after a lapse is simple: post a current job update and you're back in rotation.

If you've gone quiet for months, post three times in one week to refill the section, then drop to a weekly cadence. Google does not penalise catch-up posting.

Treat GBP posting like a job-site habit, not a marketing campaign. Five minutes per finished job. Fifty posts a year builds a track record no newcomer to your area can buy overnight.