Two parts of a Google Business Profile speak to customers when you are not watching: the questions and answers section, which any stranger can write in, and messaging, which starts a clock the moment you switch it on. Both are presented as features to enable. Both are better understood as obligations.
The questions section is public, and anyone can answer
Any person with a Google account can post a question on your profile. Any person with a Google account can answer it: a past customer, someone who has confused you with a firm of a similar name, a competitor. Their answer sits beneath your business name, and the answer with the most votes rises to the top.
Most contractors have never looked at this section. A fair number of those have something wrong sitting in it: a price from four years ago, a service they stopped offering, or a flat “no” to a question they would happily have answered yes to.
Your own answers are labelled as coming from the owner, which carries weight with readers. Answers from strangers are not labelled as anything.
Seed it with the questions your dispatcher already hears
Google permits you to post questions on your own profile, and it is the intended use of the section. Over a fortnight, have whoever answers the phone note the questions that come up before anyone books. Post those, and answer them from the business account.
The ones worth posting are the ones that decide whether somebody calls you or the next firm on the list.
- Whether you cover the caller’s town. The most common reason a promising call ends in ten seconds. Naming the towns plainly saves both parties the call.
- What after-hours actually means. Whether someone answers at eleven at night, or whether the message is picked up in the morning. Being honest here costs you a few calls and saves you several bad reviews.
- Whether there is a call-out charge, and whether it comes off the job. This is the question people are most reluctant to ask on the phone and most likely to leave over.
- What you do not work on. Brands, system types, commercial work, jobs below a certain size. Screening someone out before they call is a saving, not a loss.
None of this makes you rank. It intercepts a decision that was going to be made either way.
Messaging is a promise with a deadline attached
Enabling messaging puts a message button on your listing. Google expects replies within a day and will disable the feature for businesses that consistently do not answer.
The response window is not the real problem. The real problem is a homeowner standing over a leak who taps message instead of call, because you offered it, waits forty minutes, and rings somebody else. That lead appears in no report anywhere. It does not exist as a number you can look at and worry about.
So the question to settle before switching it on is operational rather than promotional: who has the app on their phone, what happens between six in the evening and seven in the morning, and what the answer is on a Sunday. If nobody owns it, leave it off. A listing with no message button loses nothing. A listing with an unanswered one loses jobs, and eventually collects reviews about being ignored.
If you do turn it on
- Put it on more than one phone. One person’s day off should not close the channel.
- Write the automated welcome honestly. Not “thanks for your message”, but a realistic response time and the phone number for anything that cannot wait.
- Move urgent conversations to the phone quickly. Typing is a poor way to diagnose anything, and the customer usually wants to be told when someone is coming.
- Turn it off for periods you cannot cover. A holiday week or a stretch short-staffed. Off is better than slow.
Engagement is a by-product, not a target
Profile views and interactions move up and down for reasons that have little to do with anything you did, and chasing them produces busywork. These two features are worth attention because each one sits directly in front of a decision, not because they move a figure in a dashboard.
Neither is a substitute for the things that determine whether you appear at all, which remain your primary category, how close you are to the person searching, and your reviews.
Frequently asked questions
Can I delete a wrong answer on my Google Business Profile?
Not directly. You can report an answer that breaks Google’s content policies, and you can post your own answer from the business account, which is labelled as the owner’s reply. In practice the second is the more reliable of the two.
Is it against the rules to post my own questions?
No. Posting the questions customers commonly ask, and answering them yourself, is the section’s intended use. That is quite different from writing your own reviews, which is prohibited.
Does turning on messaging improve local rankings?
There is no good reason to believe it does. Enable it if you can answer it, because of the jobs it wins, and not in the hope of moving a position.
How quickly do I have to reply to a message?
Google’s own expectation is within a day, but a homeowner with an active leak has a much shorter tolerance than that. Treat anything longer than an hour during working time as a lost job.
Where to start
Open your own profile on a phone in a private browsing window and read the questions section the way a customer would. Whatever is sitting there has been sitting there for a while.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our Google Business Profile management or book a strategy call.
