Why You Should Update Your Google Hours

Hey, good morning, everyone. So this is kind like a bonus of Facebook live episode we're doing here. So just wanted to talk to you about updating your Google my business hours. So what? Google my business basically, as is your Google map listing for the business. So if I go look up right now, Bear City Impact and I just Google that it's going to give you my address, phone number and then the current hours for Friday and then you can see more hours. So nothing is more frustrating than when I go to visit a business. And I looked up to see if they're open currently. And I see it says, oh, hey, they're open till 6:00 p.m. on Friday. And so I go there perhaps at 5 0 5 and they're closed. And this is because that business has not updated those business hours on Google. Perhaps those are old hours. Maybe they took the business over. Who knows? Who cares? The hours are wrong. And what's even more frustrating is when I've talked to different business owners about this to help them out. Often the comment that I get back is like they're very frustrated with Google or oh, that's just what Google. It's wrong. And that's true. So fix it. It's not super complicated. It's actually not complicated at all. Basically, all you need to do is just go to business, dot Google, dot com. I'll leave it in the descriptions business that Google dot com and you go there and you may need to claim your business, which basically means there is an auto-generated version of your business on Google that you just need to claim as, hey, I'm the representative for this business, or you may have already claimed it some time ago, but you've just neglected to look at the current information and just need to update it. 

In either case, you want to log into business that Google dot com and update those hours. Now on the other side to it. So that was the first example where you're saying you're open later, but you are really closing earlier. So that creates a super frustrating experience for people on the other side. You might be losing out business because you might say that you're only open till 5:00, but in reality, up until 6:00. So I might have looked up your business and go, oh, while they close at 5:00, I'm not going to have a chance to get there. In reality, you're open for a whole nother hour, twiddling your thumb, waiting for people to come in your store. But you've told Google and Yelp and Facebook and Apple Maps and all these other places that you're not open told, you know, the time that you're actually open, what it says on the window of your store. So Google Maps is by far the most important one to get updated and get accurate. But you can update other ones like Apple Maps, Yelp, Super Pages, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, those different directory listings. It's kind of a pain in the butt to order them each individually, one by one. You can use different services. Bear City Impact does this as well, where we'll go through a client's business and do a kind of a sweeping update across all the directories or the ones that they choose to update business information across the board. This is known as creating a universal name, address, phone and business info across Apple Maps, Google Maps, super pages, all those different directory listings. But the most important one to do right now is business that Google dot com, which is your Google map location. 

You know, there's about 12 days left in the holiday shopping season, so it's probably too late to talk about this. But since there is a couple of weeks, I thought it was important. Anyways, you really don't want to miss out on people that might want to be coming to your business later in the evening. If you're open later, you know, for your holiday hours and certainly you don't want to irritate people that are looking to shop during the holiday season and they find that you're closed even though it said you're open. So that's just a quick little tip. Hope you enjoyed that and hope that was beneficial. If you did find it beneficial, feel free to share this post on your feet or your business page feed. That would really help me or tag another friend in the comments here that owns a business. And don't be afraid to do like a shameless. Hey, your hours are wrong. This is how you can fix them. So, you know, some fun banter is always good. But otherwise, again, I hope that was valuable to you. And if you did like this, by the way, just drop a quick comment if you like this. You know, I'm considering doing these like a little mini live sessions that are like two to three minutes with just like a really quick like. Just one tip. You know, I could perhaps do this every day. It's just a couple minutes or just a couple times a week. But just let me know if this was something that was interesting or not. So I don't certainly waste my time. I just want to be able to help you. That was it. That was your morning impact for Friday. December 13th.

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For a more complete article on Google and SEO, check out the article 9 Tips To Rank Number One On Google Maps.