Get a leg up on Google

At Perch, we're all about empowering small businesses to spend less time marketing and more time doing what they do best. With that in mind, over the last year we've added functionality to use the tools that Google provides through their Google My Business interface but with the added benefits of scheduling posts and adding frequently asked Questions and Answers within our experience. Both of these work flows aren't provided through Google and by allowing our users to quickly add these important SEO tools we can help them to get found and get chosen.

My Role

UX Researcher
User Testing Facilitator
Prototyper
Visual Designer
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Perch is an app that consolidates many aspects of a business's marketing channels. Whether it's reviews on Yelp or Google or the ability to make a post on Facebook, Perch offers tools to manage the online presence of our customers. During this aspect of our development, we implemented the ability to post to Google My Business directly from the Perch app. This offered a great way to consolidate functionality that our users are directed to do through our marketing tips and guidance. To add an additional layer of usability, we added the ability to schedule posts ahead of time and have them posted on a future desired date. This is added functionality that Google does not offer that helped to separate our experience from the basic Google capabilities.

Target Audience

Allowing our users to post to Google is a major part of the functionality of the Perch application so this addition is geared towards all of our users. However, it focuses on those users that really need to boost their online presence through the continuous addition of photos, updated posts, and offer posts that help boost their Google 'findability'. Our research shows that consistent posting is ranked higher by Google's algorithm.
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The Power of Posts

For small businesses, posting to Google is a critical step in getting found and getting chosen by their customers. At Perch, one of our foundational guidance steps is to post on a regular cadence so that Google will rank searches for your type of business higher than those that do not post regularly. We incorporated the posting flow in a previous sprint that allows users to post to Google directly from Perch.

Adding Functionality to Differentiate

Using our own internal process of a modified Google Venture sprint combined with surveys to current Perch users, our next step was to add the ability to Schedule posts directly through Perch. This would allow users to put a number of posts in the hopper to be posted by our service at a future time. Our perceived value of this functionality was high as it was something Google did not offer and was a time and effort saving addition to the app.

Response from our Users

After we launched this functionality, we made sure to monitor its use on FullStory and through our personal Marketing Guides that walk their customers through monthly calls. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with many users scheduling their posts many months out.