A few weeks ago Google started rolling a new feature within Google Maps that allows users to ask questions to a business directly from the search results page.
The feature, labelled as Google Q&A, looks to have big impacts for local businesses, including hotels. The following article will examine how hotels can use this new feature for promotions, including how to enable it, how to manage it, issues surrounding it, and how to use it to its full potential to optimize your hotel listing in Google’s search products.
What is Google Q&A?
In a nutshell, it’s simply the ability to ask a question directly to a business within Maps (and likewise Google search), allowing the business owner or other local users that have a good “trust rating” to answer the questions. These Q&As are then visible within search, which at time of launch was just for Android users within the search app.
It started to appear in mid-August for mobile users (Android only), but has since also started appearing for Desktop users and will likely gain more prominence over the next few weeks or months. That does however depend on how well users react to the feature. Google can (and frequently does) launch and then “sunset” new features if they do not test well or improve their users’ search experience.
The aim is to give business owners an opportunity to interact with their customers, likely in a bid to compete with Facebook’s platform, whereby businesses with a page listed on Facebook can already interact with their customers through direct messages and visitor messages.
Google announced this feature to their Local Guides team in mid August. Not only can users post questions through the features, other users have the ability to upvote questions to help them gain visibility.
