As we get into the hustle of the holiday season, making your Google Business profile (formely Google My Business or GMB) data accurate and relevant should be your focus to make it easy for people to find you on search and improve your interaction with them.
Plan any holiday hours changes 4 weeks ahead of the change
To start with, you can plan ahead for this holiday season and schedule your special hours in advance – ensuring that you are ready and your hours are accurate and potential customers are informed.
If you work with an agency or service provider, open the service request 3 weeks in advance of when the hours change to allow people to adjustIn addition, adding special attributes will improve the chances of your business showing up as a relevant result on search.
Together, you could be the customer’s choice for ‘near me’, ‘now’ or ‘open’ type of searches as your attributes tick the box of what the customer is looking for and your special hours proved your availability.
Google Business special hours options that you can set in advance
For this holiday season, you can choose to set your special hours on certain days and it will return to your regular hours of opening/closing on the day that follows your special hours setting. Here are your options when setting special hours:
- If you’re temporarily closing for a few days
Once you have chosen the business location under ‘special hours’ on Google Business for the days that you are closed, select ‘Closed’ and enter the effective hours your business will be closed.
However, if your business is closed for 7 days in a row or more, you will have to mark it as ‘Temporarily Closed’.
- If your business hours are flexible
If your business hours may change on certain days during the holiday season, you can choose the message option ‘Hours may differ’ if you’re closing earlier or later than the normal.
- For special events
If you’re having an event on a certain day on your business property, select the date and select the hours of your event. If your event is going past midnight, ensure that the hours are set properly.
Why setting your GB special hours accurately is important
Having accurate special hours will reduce friction and improve trust with potential customers. While marking your business as ‘Temporarily Closed’ will not affect your rankings on search, having negative reviews by customers for a business location due to any sort of inconvenience caused could affect your rankings as the search engine could perceive your business as deviant from the Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-A-T) guidelines.
Using Milestone Local, your business can set its special hours, amenities, and other profile information (including images & videos) for all its locations, across multiple directories on a single screen. It gets better, if you’re having a special event, offering, or just want to update customers on ‘What’s new’ with your business, you can create a Google Post with ease and publish them to the GB locations of your choice.
To know more, reach out to us at [email protected] or call us on +1 408 200 2211.
