The two biggest shopping days for online retailers are quickly approaching: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. “Hold on a second, are we already there?” you might think. But the truth is that there are already some actions you can take to minimize the stress before the big weekend suddenly knocks on your door.
Let us give you an early heads up about opening hours and other Black Friday location tips!
Set opening hours
Don’t give your customers a reason to doubt whether you’re open or not. Set your holiday hours so customers can be confident in their decision to visit your store. 73% of consumers say they lose trust in a company if their listing information is incorrect and the holidays are no exception for inaccurate listing information.
Last but not least, don’t forget to add special hours for every location across every directory. Setting special hours isn’t just for Google My Business Listings (GMB), you can set special hours on Yelp, Bing, Facebook etc.
-1.jpg)
.jpg)
Don’t wait until the last minute! We recommend to set your opening hours as soon as possible. Otherwise, you might risk missing out on potential customers.
You won't turn up to a closed store any more
We have all been there. The annoying warning “Black friday might affect these hours”. In these cases, “Black friday hours”, are more welcomed.
Google wants you to be prepared for this holiday season. Today, Maps and Search now show you what time your local stores will close. You’ll find the specific holiday hours for businesses shown alongside normal store hours for the businesses.
Source: Google Data, U.S., Oct.-Dec. 2014 and 2016
Include Black Friday keywords in your content, now!
With retailers sharing Black Friday deals earlier and earlier, shoppers have a bigger opportunity to make more informed decisions about their purchases.
For example, mobile searches containing “Black Friday” increased by 80% over the past two years (e.g., “when is Black Friday,” “lowes black Friday,” “best Black Friday deals”).
Already at the beginning of November, people start with generic, non-branded searches for Black Friday, (e.g., "black Friday furniture sale" and "black Friday makeup deals 2019"). Then, about two and a half weeks before the four-day weekend, there is a switch to searches for Black Friday becoming mostly branded (e.g., "IKEA furniture black Friday" and "Kicks black Friday 2019").
This means you should be working on implementing keywords and phrases as soon as possible to your website and other search locator pages. For example, if you search for “black Friday sale near me” you will likely see a Local Pack like this:
And don’t forget!
Updating hours for every location one by one takes forever. Do you want to save time? Make bulk changes to multiple listings at once by using software like PinMeTo Places. Want to know more?
