Questions and Answers Nobody Monitors

The section nobody opens

Google My Business includes a public questions area. Somebody looking you up can ask a question, and it appears on your listing alongside your hours and reviews.

Most owners have never seen it, because it is not where you go to change your hours and nothing draws attention to it.

Meanwhile it is visible to everybody who looks you up, sitting directly beneath the phone number, which is exactly where somebody deciding whether to call is looking.

Anybody can answer

The part that surprises people and the reason this matters more than the volume suggests.

Answers are not restricted to the business. Any member of the public can answer a question about your business, and their answer appears publicly.

Sometimes that is a past customer being helpful, which is fine and occasionally better than anything you would have written.

Sometimes it is somebody guessing, somebody remembering how things were four years ago, or somebody confusing you with a different business.

And occasionally it is a competitor, which is less common than owners fear and does happen.

What goes wrong

• Wrong prices, quoted from a visit in 2018.
• Wrong hours, or a claim you are closed on a day you are open.
• Services you no longer offer, confirmed by a stranger.
• Services you do offer, denied by somebody who did not know.
• Unanswered questions, which read as a business ignoring people.

The last is the most common and the most damaging in aggregate. A question sitting unanswered for eight months tells every subsequent reader something you did not intend to say.

Notifications are unreliable

Worth knowing so you do not assume you would have heard.

Notifications for these questions have historically been inconsistent: some arrive, some do not, and they depend on which account is receiving them and what settings were chosen at setup.

Plenty of businesses have questions from two years ago that nobody ever saw.

Which means this needs a deliberate check rather than a response to an alert, and the check is where the whole habit lives.

Look at your own listing from a signed-out browser, since what you see inside the dashboard is not always what a customer sees.

Ask and answer your own

Permitted, sensible, and almost nobody does it.

An owner can post a question and answer it, which turns the section into a small frequently-asked list in the place people are actually looking.

Take the questions your phone gets most: whether you cover a particular area, whether you take a payment method, whether an appointment is needed, what the parking is like, whether you handle a particular type of job.

Post each as a question and answer it plainly.

Do not disguise it as a customer asking. Answer as the business, factually, and let it be obvious what it is. The value is in the information being there, not in it appearing spontaneous.

How to answer well

Short, specific, and complete enough that nobody needs to phone to clarify.

Answer the question asked rather than the one you would prefer, since a deflection reads worse than an unwelcome answer.

Where the answer is genuinely variable, say what it depends on rather than saying it depends.

Include the useful detail: not just yes we deliver, but yes, within roughly forty kilometres, usually within two working days.

And answer promptly, because a question answered the same day reads very differently from one answered in March.

A worked example

A tool hire business looked at their listing questions for the first time after three years.

There were nine. Two had been answered by the business, both by a member of staff who had since left.

Four had been answered by members of the public, of which one was wrong: somebody had stated confidently that a deposit was required on all hires, which had stopped being true two years earlier.

Three were unanswered, the oldest from twenty months previously.

They answered everything, corrected the deposit answer with their own reply, and seeded six questions covering what the counter staff were asked most.

The manager's view afterwards was that the deposit answer had probably cost them more enquiries than any marketing they had run that year, and it had been sitting there in public the whole time.

Upvotes decide what shows

A mechanic worth understanding because it affects which answer people see.

Questions and answers can be voted on, and the most upvoted tend to display first, with the rest behind a link most people do not open.

So a wrong answer with three votes can sit above your correct answer with none.

You cannot remove somebody else's answer for being wrong, only for breaking the content rules, so the practical remedy is to add your own answer and have it seen.

Asking a few staff or genuine customers to upvote a correct answer is a reasonable response to that, and manufacturing votes at scale is not, for the same reasons that apply to reviews.

When an answer is genuinely bad

There is a reporting route, and it has limits worth knowing before you rely on it.

Content that is offensive, off-topic, spam, or clearly promotional for another business can be reported through the listing, and it is sometimes removed.

Content that is simply wrong usually is not, because being incorrect is not against the rules.

That is frustrating and it is why the reliable answer is always to add your own correct reply rather than to wait for a removal.

Where something is defamatory or genuinely damaging rather than merely inaccurate, that is a different situation and one for advice rather than a reporting form.

The counter-case

This is a small feature and should be kept in proportion.

Most listings have very few questions, and a business with none is not being harmed by an empty section.

Seeding twenty questions where nobody has asked any produces a wall of self-authored text that reads oddly and is not what the section is for.

Four or five genuine common questions is the useful amount, and the check afterwards is a few minutes every month or two rather than an ongoing task.

There is also no evidence this affects ranking meaningfully. The argument for doing it is that customers read it while deciding, which is reason enough without inflating it.

The routine

1. Open your listing signed out and find the questions.
2. Answer everything, including old ones.
3. Correct wrong answers with your own reply.
4. Seed four or five questions you are genuinely asked.
5. Answer as the business, plainly.
6. Report only rule-breaking content, not mere errors.
7. Check every month or two.

Step one takes two minutes and a good number of businesses find something they would rather not have had sitting there.

Handling criticism in public is covered in answering a complaint in public.

Frequently asked questions

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