13 Actionable Tips to Optimize the New Google Questions & Answers

13 Quick Tips to Optimize the New Google Q & A

The new Google Places Q & A offers a lot of potential for both helping and hurting a business. Here are some thoughts on how your business should approach this new and untried feature in the Google Local Knowledge Panel.

How will New Google Q & A Work?

Usually, A Q&A website is a website where the site creators use the images of pop culture icons to answer input from the site's visitors, usually in question/answer format; Like Quora and Yahoo Answer.

Tips - 1: Give Informative Answers

Treat New Google Q&A as an opportunity to solve a potential customer’s future problem. The better you answer, the more likely your customer will upvote your answer and this will help your get new clients and more brand awareness.

Tips - 2: Get out in front of them.

Crowd sourcing can be intimidating to the typical business but its best if you approach this, like reviews and photos, proactively. Having good Q & A’s posted will limit the opportunity for mischief.

Tips - 3: Start Now.

Write out some questions that you can post to your listing. This will give the early postings a chance to be upvoted more over time.

Tips - 4: Make sure that You really Write Frequently Asked Questions.

It's imperative that you listen to incoming phone calls and list out the actual questions that clients frequently ask before they come into the store. This will save you and them time which is one of the things that purchase funnel optimization is about. The obvious candidates here are the very real concerns about parking questions, special hours, appointments and other conveniences.

Tips - 5: Think long tail as well.

Once you have identified the low hanging fruit, brainstorm some of the less frequently asked questions (but asked) about some of your less well known services. “Does this bakery offer gluten free choices?” I am NOT saying to treat this as a keyword spamming opportunity. It isn’t but going niche can be helpful.

Tips - 6: Communicate

Engage with Q&A visitors. Upvote great answers, follow people who are interested in your topics. Show that you’re genuinely interested in developing your credibility. Stop trying to sell and start focusing on leading, influencing and connecting instead.

Tips - 7: Plan for Scanning.

Customers are a busy lot and you want to be sure that both the questions are easy to read and the answer are brief but accurate. Be brief and too the point. These need to be short answers to real questions.

Tips - 8: Write for Your Audience

A lot of businesses and marketers automatically go into sales mode when they see someone with a problem that their product can fix. But that’s not the approach you want to take. Here’s the problem with trying to immediately sell to someone who asks a question:

1. People hate being sold to
2. It doesn’t seem genuine
3. You want to build a relationship first
4. It turns you into a salesperson, not an authority/expert

Instead of shoving your products and services down their throat, come up with a well written, valuable piece of content that addresses their question. Remember, you’re not just responding to the one person who asked the question. You’re responding to potentially thousands of your future customers who might buy your services or products.

Tips - 9: Customers Voice

Write them using your customers voice. These are meant to be accessible and easy to understand, not marketing pieces.

Tips - 10: Make the Answers Useful

Make them useful to both parties, your business and the customer. Obviously the goal here to facilitate interactions between the right kind of customer and your business.

Tips - 11: Control Yourself

Control yourself and don’t over do it. Its best if there are fewer rather than more. (I am not yet sure what that means but…)

Tips - 12: Make A Plan for Disaster.

This is a crowd sourced environment after all and we all know that weird and unpleasant things can arise. Write down a plan so that in the heat of the moment you don’t do something stupid. Usually the first step is to take a breath and call a trusted advisor (to talk you off of the cliff).

Tips - 13: Monitor and Update

Monitor your Knowledge Panel for new questions. If they are legit be the first to answer. Use your Google My Business login and the answer will be noted as from the business owner. This is likely going to be a problem for multi location chains as their is no API or in dashboard notification but it is necessary. Hopefully Google will prioritize the development of tools to deal with this both proactively and at scale.

What's your tips? Please share your opinion in the comment form and Follow me at Quora and Yahoo Answer.