Straight answers for local service businesses
Yes, answer it. The Q&A section on your Google Business Profile is open to the public, which means any random person, or a competitor, can answer a question about your business and their answer shows up right next to your listing. You should also post your own common questions and answer them yourself, which Google allows. Ten or so seeded questions plus a monthly check is all the work this takes.
It's the crowdsourced question box that shows up on your listing when someone searches your business name or finds you in Maps. Anyone with a Google account can ask a question there. And here's the part most owners miss: anyone with a Google account can answer it too.
Not just you. Not just your customers. Anyone. A guy who used you three years ago. Someone who confused you with a different company. A competitor who'd love for people to think you don't do weekend calls.
Your answers get labeled as coming from the owner, which gives them weight. But they don't automatically go to the top, and they don't block anyone else from chiming in.
Yes, and quickly. A question sitting unanswered on your profile is a small leak. Someone searched your name, had a real question, and got silence. That person goes back to the search results and calls the next plumber.
Worse is a question answered wrong. I've seen listings where a stranger answered "do they do water heaters?" with "I don't think so" because they personally hadn't used that service. That's a water heater job walking out the door, every week, for as long as it sits there.
You can't delete other people's answers. You can only flag them if they violate Google's policies, which is a slow and unreliable process. What you can do, immediately, is post the correct answer as the owner and get it upvoted.
Yes. Google explicitly allows business owners to post questions about their own business and answer them. This is the single most useful thing in this whole article.
Go to your profile while signed in to a different Google account than your business account (a personal Gmail works), ask the question, then switch back to your business account and answer it. Then upvote your own answer once from the personal account. The question with the most upvotes is the one that shows by default on your listing.
You're not gaming anything. You're building a public FAQ in the exact spot where people are already looking at your business and deciding whether to call.
Think about what a stranger on your phone would need to know before dialing. Not what you want to say. What they need to know. For most trades it's the same handful:
Eight to ten is plenty. More than that and nobody reads any of them.
Short. Direct. Written like a person, not a brochure. Compare these two:
"We proudly serve the greater metro area with a full suite of residential and commercial solutions tailored to each client's unique needs."
"We cover Medford, Somerville, Arlington, Malden, and Everett. Residential mostly, some small commercial. Call 555-0147 and we'll tell you straight if you're in range."
The second one gets the call. Put the phone number in answers where it makes sense, especially the emergency one. There's no rule against it.
One caution: don't put anything in there you'll have to maintain constantly. Specific dollar prices that change every season will go stale and you'll forget to update them. Ranges age better.
Monthly, on a calendar reminder. Google's notifications for new Q&A entries are inconsistent, and plenty of owners have found a question from eleven months ago that they never got an alert for.
Here's the check, and it takes two minutes:
Honestly, it's not a big ranking lever. Don't stuff it with keywords expecting to climb the map pack. That's not what it does.
What it does is convert. Someone is already looking at your listing. They've got one objection left. If the answer is sitting right there, they call. If it isn't, they keep shopping. That's the whole value, and it's worth more than most of the busywork people do on their profiles.
The other half of the value is defensive. Your Q&A section is a public comment box bolted to your business name, and you don't control who writes in it. The cheapest way to control what's there is to fill it yourself, first, with answers that are accurate and helpful.
Spend twenty minutes this week seeding it. Then forget about it until next month.
No. You can only delete content you posted yourself. For anything else you can flag it as inappropriate, but Google's review is slow and often doesn't result in removal. The practical fix is to post a correct owner answer right underneath it.
Sometimes, through the Google Maps app if notifications are enabled on the account that manages the profile. It's unreliable enough that you shouldn't depend on it. Check manually once a month.
No. Google allows business owners to post and answer their own frequently asked questions. What's not allowed is fake reviews, which are a completely separate feature with different rules.
The Q&A section shows on mobile search, the Google Maps app, and the desktop knowledge panel, but it can be hidden behind a tap and it only appears once at least one question exists. If yours is empty, ask the first question yourself and it will show up.
Yes, especially for emergency or scheduling questions. There's no rule against it, and someone reading an answer at 9 p.m. with a flooded basement shouldn't have to scroll back up to find how to reach you.
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