How to use the questions section on your Google profile

There is a box on your Google listing that most owners have never opened, and it is the only part of the page where a complete stranger can write something that looks like it came from you. It sits under the reviews and it is labelled questions and answers, which makes it sound like a help desk rather than what it actually is.

Here is the part that catches people out. Anybody can ask a question there, and anybody at all can answer it — a past customer, a competitor, somebody who confused you with a business two streets away. Their answer appears underneath your name, with no marker saying it came from a stranger, and it stays there until somebody does something about it.

Go and look at yours first

Before reading any further, open your listing on a phone while signed out of Google and scroll down past the reviews. Most owners find one of three things.

Often the box is completely empty. That is the most common outcome and the easiest to fix. Sometimes there are two or three questions sitting unanswered, occasionally for years, which reads badly for a reason that has nothing to do with the questions themselves — an unanswered question makes a business look abandoned. And every so often there is an answer from somebody you have never met, confidently telling the public something about your prices that was never true.

That third case is rarer than the scare stories suggest, but it does happen, and the reason it matters is that the answer carries the authority of the page it's sitting on.

You are allowed to ask and answer your own questions

This is the bit that feels like cheating and isn't. Google intends for business owners to seed this section themselves, and posting the questions you get asked most, with your own answers underneath, is a normal and encouraged use of it.

It takes about fifteen minutes. You ask the question from your own account, then answer it from the business profile, and the answer shows as coming from the owner. Do ten in one sitting and the section goes from empty to genuinely useful. There is also no longer a gap for somebody else to fill.

Write the questions the way a customer would type them, not the way you would phrase them in a brochure. "Do you charge for a quote?" rather than "What is your pre-visit assessment policy?"

Which ten questions

Not the ones you wish people asked. The ones you say out loud every single week, usually while driving, usually for the fourth time that day.

For most local businesses the list runs something like this. How far do you travel, do you charge for coming out, can you do evenings or weekends. What's the smallest job you'll take, and how quickly can you get here. Do you take card, are you insured, do I need to be in. What happens if it turns out bigger than expected, and roughly what does something like this cost.

That last one is the question owners most want to dodge and the one customers most want answered. A range with a condition attached beats silence every time: "most of these come in between £90 and £140 depending on access, and I'll tell you before I start if it's going to be more than that."

Keep the answers short and specific

The answers that work read like you talking, not like terms and conditions. Two or three sentences. A real number wherever you can give one. No hedging that ends up saying nothing.

Compare "pricing varies depending on the specifics of each individual job, please contact us for a bespoke quotation" with "a call-out is £60, which comes off the bill if I do the work the same day." One of those is a wall. The other is a person telling you where you stand.

Where the honest answer is no, say no. "We don't do roofs" saves you three phone calls a week and costs you nothing, because the people you're turning away were never going to become customers.

What to do about a wrong answer from a stranger

You cannot delete another person's answer, which is the frustrating part. What you can do is add your own directly underneath, clearly marked as coming from the business, and the owner's answer is given visual weight on the page.

You can also report an answer that breaks Google's content rules. The guidelines for representing your business set out what counts. That route is slow and often comes back with nothing, so treat your own reply as the real fix and the report as a lottery ticket.

Then set a reminder to check the section every few months. New questions arrive without any notification reaching you, which is the single most common reason they sit unanswered.

The same answers are needed in more places than this

Once you have written those ten questions and answers, notice what you have actually made. It's a plain-language summary of how your business works, in the customer's own words, and it is the most useful piece of writing most small businesses never get round to.

It is also stuck inside one box on one platform. The same questions arrive through your website, by text, and on the phone at half past eight in the evening. They increasingly arrive through AI apps too, which people now use to draw up a shortlist before contacting anybody. Answering them once in Google's box doesn't help you anywhere else.

That's the gap hailera exists to close: you write that set of answers once, check every one of them yourself, and publish it as an agent, so your website and the apps people ask can read the same answers directly rather than guessing from an old page. The Google box is free and does real work on its own, though — so fill that in first, and only look further if you find the same questions still reaching you everywhere else.

Fifteen minutes, once

This is one of the few jobs in a small business that is genuinely finished when you finish it. Ten questions, ten short answers, a note in the diary for three months' time. Done.

It won't transform anything on its own. What it does is remove a small pile of reasons for somebody to not ring you, and those reasons are worth more than they look, because the person who doesn't ring never tells you why.

Today: open your listing signed out, scroll to the questions section, and write down what you find. If it's empty, you know what the fifteen minutes is for.

Sources

• Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.