If you’ve been searching for a business on Google whilst on your phone in recent days you may have seen an interesting development. When you search for a specific business, what you’ll often see is their Google map listing at the top of your page (as in the image above this post).
Google has added several features to this over time – first ‘opening times’ were added in order to make it easier for people searching to understand whether you were likely to be contactable at that point in time, then came more recent additions such as the number of Facebook reviews you’ve received.
The latest and newest addition, which has only been rolled out in the past two days (this blog post was written on the 8th September 2017), is a Question and Answer section, which allows Google users to ask and respond to questions about the business.
How could this potentially be used by local businesses?
As you will see from the image at the top of the page, the questions and answers section will be prominent on your map listing. For that reason, it does provide a potentially significant opportunity going forward.
Most businesses will have questions they’re frequently asked – it’s the reason a lot will have an FAQ page on their website (many of which will rarely be visited! You could take the most significant of those and move them to your Google map listings by asking and responding to questions. Whilst there will be an element of work involved in doing this, you’ll then be using those points to better engage with your searching audience, and provide them with the knowledge that you’re the business for them!
We’ll be keeping an eye on this as it begins to be used by more businesses and of course keep you informed of how best to use it.
For any more information on how we can help your business grow online then please give us a call on 01566 232323 or drop us an email at hello@mihidigital.co.uk