SMX Overtime: When to use the Q&A in Google My Business and how to keep it fresh

SMX‌ ‌Overtime‌ ‌is‌ ‌part‌ ‌of‌ ‌our‌ ‌speaker‌ ‌series‌ ‌from‌ ‌conference‌ ‌presenters‌ ‌who‌ ‌answer‌ ‌questions‌ ‌from‌ ‌SMX‌ attendees‌ ‌on‌ ‌a‌ ‌variety‌ ‌of‌ ‌topics.‌ ‌

Senior SEO Manager at Two Octobers, Niki Mosier, was one of the SMX West speakers for the “Google My Business: Optimizing Images, Content And Q&A For Ranking Visibility And Engagement” session in San Jose. She and fellow presenter Greg Gifford fielded a lot of questions about GMB so Niki took the time to answer a few of them for us. 

Can business managed FAQ help as well for improving ranking.. how can we use this to improve ranking for product pages?

I’ve yet to see GMB Q&A help with the actual ranking of a listing in the search results. However, I think the benefits it can have include lead gen and helping to answer questions people have right in the listing. If you are looking to improve ranking for your product pages, I would recommend seeding some questions about specific products and including a call to action in the answer to go to the product page (you can’t use the URL or Google will filter the response). The increased traffic to the product pages may help improve your on-page metrics, which could, in turn, have a small impact on ranking. I would also recommend adding your products to your GMB listing, where you can directly link to them on your website. 

What are the current thoughts on whether or not Google will charge businesses to be in the 3-pack?

My opinion is that in the near future Google may add some pay-to-play features to the GMB listing to make more money off of GMB listings. But I don’t think Google would make a change to charging businesses to be in the 3-pack. 

Any tools that help post to multiple locations?

There are some tools (like this one) that allow you to post to multiple locations. However, due to API limitations, you can only post to 10 locations at a time with most tools at this time. 

Are there tools/systematic ways to monitor and fight spams or inaccurate listings under your brand name? (Other than searching in maps)

You can use Google Alerts to setup alerts for brand mentions, you can be alerted when something pops up. I would also suggest using Whitespark to do a citation audit if you haven’t done one to look for any inaccurate listings. 

What about adding services? Do they help with SEO?

I think anytime that you can get more visibility for the services or products your business offers, that’s definitely helpful. It is important to note that the service menu only shows up on mobile. The service list doesn’t have an option to link directly to a page, so the direct SEO value from adding services is hard to measure.