Google Questions and Answers for local businesses now available For Android

Google has launched a new feature for businesses within Google Maps to answer commonly asked questions from prospects and customers directly over their Android devices. Marissa Nordahl from the Google My Business team announced this late Friday.

Nordahl said, “We’re excited to announce that Google is bringing Questions and Answers to businesses.” The feature is being rolled out now to some businesses that use Google Maps for Android. These question and answers can be visible to users who view your Google Maps listing. Here are screen shots:

A few things to note about this new feature:

• Use it to add frequently asked questions and answers that will be accessible right in their listings.

• Businesses will need to have access to Google Maps on Android to get push notifications when a users posts a question or answers someone else’s question.

• Businesses and users can thumb up questions and answers from other people.

Google said this will only be visible for your own listings over the “next few days,” and then later, you can see it for other listings. “Over the next week we’ll start rolling out this feature more broadly, so that you’ll see the feature on listings other than your own, and other people will be able to ask and answer questions about your listing,” Google added.

Mike Blumenthal has more details on this rollout, answering dozens of other questions you might have about this. Again, this is only out for Android users and is not currently available in the web interface or for iOS users.

I should note, Sergey Alakov spotted Google testing this feature a few weeks ago.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.