Welcome back to Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki. This week we’re talking about a recent update to the Google My Business Questions and Answers feature.
For the ‘noobs’, if you don’t know what the Questions and Answers feature is, it’s a new element that was added to the Google My Business profiles about a year ago. It’s a community discussion feature, basically an interface for crowd-sourced information about your business.
Anyone can ask a question about your business, and anyone in the community can respond to the question. Most businesses still don’t know that Q&A is even there, so the majority of the questions are answered by other people in the local community.
About a month ago, Google updated how the feature works on mobile devices. Whenever a user starts to type a question, Google is now auto-suggesting answers to the question. Live.
It’s pretty cool – check out this video:
As I click the widget and start typing a question, relevant answers are automatically suggested.
Google will suggest answers based on answers to other questions that were already submitted if they’re similar questions. And in many cases, it may serve up information from reviews that contain that relevant information.
So what does that mean to you? You should be paying attention to your GMB Q&A section and answering any questions that are submitted. You can even ask your own questions, so if there are common questions asked by your customers, put them into GMB and then go answer them. Now when users start to type in those same questions on their mobile device, Google will auto-suggest your answer, which makes it more likely that you’ll capture that customer.
So now it’s that time – put your hand on the screen right here…
BOOM – we totally just high-fived cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for checking out this week’s ‘Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki’, and don’t forget to come back next week for another awesome video. See you next Tuesday!