Google My Business Guide
Questions & Answers
Questions & Answers in Your GMB Profile
The Questions and Answers section is vastly underutilized by business owners. If you are not monitoring this and responding as a business, it can result in misinformation about your business, irrelevant/off-topic questions, or worse create reputation issues; this is a crowd-sourced feature and any user can ask questions and provide answers, the idea is to provide searchers with even more details about a business and help influence their decision to make a purchase or book an appointment.
What you need to know about this feature:
It’s crowd-sourced information, so you can’t control what people ask or what other people say in return, however; you can write a response from the business. Google moderates the questions.
It can become a reputation management issue as some users can spam questions, use it to complain about business or share grievances, and there’s always the risk of Internet trolls.
The suggested answers that show up are sourced from customer reviews. This is a pretty big deal, what your customers are saying is at the forefront over any company responses. As a business owner it is critical to create your own list of top questions with corresponding answers to address your audience’s questions before they even have to ask. You may also benefit from encouraging customers to use keywords in their reviews.
Questions can be “liked” and voted up – so if there are really good questions in there, that you want potential searchers to see, you should “like it” as it can influence it’s position.
To ask/respond as the business owner, your listing has to be verified, you have to have Manager access, and be logged in. To use the feature you just go to your branded Knowledge Panel in search results on desktop or mobile.
What You Need to Do as a Business Owner:
1. Monitor & Respond to Questions
You should be monitoring these questions. Make sure you check off the option in your settings to receive email alerts about Q&A’s.
Our Reputation Builder software provides Google Q&A monitoring as well, business owners receive an email alert when new questions and answers are added. You can manage your questions and answers by updating the status to open, closed, or reported, see all the answers, and click to view/respond to a specific question on your listing.
Respond to the questions – provide answers to users, even if someone else has already given the correct information. Seeing a direct response from a business owner will help validate the other responses, and it’s an engagement opportunity with a potential customer.
2. Report Spam, Inappropriate, or Off topic Questions
If you are getting spam, off-topic, or inappropriate questions, report them. The only way to help keep your profile clean is by maintaining it.
3. Address Complaints & Comments
If a user has left a complaint or comment about the business rather than a question, you can approach this the same way you would a negative review. Users have the ability to edit or remove comments, so there’s a chance that once you help in finding a solution the comment/complaint could be removed.
4. Create Your Own FAQs
Get all your FAQs into your listing. If you already have a list of frequently asked questions on your own website, add them to your listing. Source the questions and answers in advance and have them there for searchers.