Holiday Hours Still Showing in January

The customer who drove over on January 2

On January 2, somebody looked up your business on their phone, saw that it was open, and drove over.

Perhaps you were open. Perhaps you had decided over Christmas to take one more day, and said so on Facebook, which they never checked.

Or the reverse: your listing still showed the holiday closure, so they never came at all, and you will never know they wanted to.

Holiday hours are set in a hurry in December, in several places, by whoever has a minute. In January they linger, contradict each other, or turn out never to have been set.

Where your hours actually live

• Google My Business, the hours most people see first, in search and on the map.
• Your website, usually in the footer and again on the contact page.
• Your Facebook page, with its own hours setting and any pinned post.
• Other directories, such as Bing, Yelp and Apple Maps.
• The voicemail greeting, which nobody thinks of as a listing.
• The sign on the door, which at least is usually right.

The first carries the most weight, because it is where most people check before setting off. It is also where a holiday change is most likely to have been made the wrong way.

Special hours and regular hours

Google My Business has two separate settings for hours, and the difference between them explains most January problems.

Regular hours are your normal week. Special hours are for particular dates, such as Christmas Day or a closure for stocktaking, and apply only to the dates you enter.

Set special hours, and the listing shows the holiday schedule on those days, then returns to normal by itself.

Edit the regular hours instead, which is what most people do in a hurry, and the holiday schedule becomes your normal week. It stays that way until somebody notices.

Changes you did not make

Your listing can also change without anybody at the business touching it.

Members of the public can suggest edits, including to hours, and Google sometimes accepts them. The dashboard flags these as updates for the owner to review, which helps only if somebody logs in.

So the useful check is not what you set in December, but what the listing shows today.

The website's own hours

On most small business sites, the hours appear in at least two places, the footer and the contact page, typed in separately and often years apart.

December adds a third: a banner or pop-up announcing the holiday closure, which is easy to put up and easy to forget.

A notice saying you are closed until January 2 is harmless on December 28. On January 10 it makes a visitor wonder what else on the site is out of date.

If your hours appear in more than one place, ask whoever maintains the site to make them come from a single setting, so a change only ever happens once.

Facebook and the directories

Facebook pages have their own hours setting, with the same temptation to edit the normal week for the holidays and forget it.

The bigger risk there is the pinned post. A holiday notice pinned to the top of the page stays there until somebody unpins it, which can be well into spring.

Bing, Yelp and Apple Maps each keep their own copy of your hours too, and Apple Maps is what an iPhone opens by default for directions.

These are seen less often than Google, but an error in them lasts longer, because nobody at the business ever looks.

A worked example

A dry cleaner in a strip mall closes from December 24 to January 1, as it does every year.

In mid-December, the owner opened Google My Business on a phone and changed the regular hours for every day to closed, since that was the setting easiest to find.

The shop reopened on January 2. The listing still said closed every day of the week, because nothing had told it otherwise.

Regular customers came anyway, because they knew. New customers searching for a dry cleaner nearby saw a listing that looked shut indefinitely, and chose the next one.

Nobody complained, so it took two days and a remark at the counter to notice.

The fix took two minutes: the regular hours were restored, and the next few holidays the shop closes for went straight into special hours.

Set the coming holidays now

January is the easiest time to enter special hours for the months ahead, because the problem is fresh.

Family Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, the August long weekend, Labour Day, Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day each send people to check whether you are open.

On a holiday with no special hours entered, Google may show a note that hours might differ, which leaves the customer guessing.

Entering them now replaces a series of hurried edits later, each one made on a phone between customers.

One person, one list

Hours go wrong when several people each update the place they happen to know about.

Give the job to one person, with a written list of every place your hours appear and how to log in to each.

A change made in five places by five people at five different times is how a business ends up with five sets of hours.

A change made from one list, in one sitting, is how it ends up with one.

The counter-case

Some businesses can relax about this.

A mobile trade with no premises has nobody driving over. Its hours are really the hours somebody answers the phone, and a voicemail saying when calls are returned does more than a listing.

A business open the same hours every week of the year never needs special hours, and only has to check that nobody else has changed them.

A business that works only by appointment can say so plainly instead of publishing hours, which removes the problem rather than managing it.

For everyone with a door that opens and closes, the order stands: Google first, then the website, then everything else.

The order to check them

1. Search your business on a phone, as a customer would.
2. Restore your regular hours on Google My Business.
3. Enter special hours for the coming holidays.
4. Remove the holiday notice from your website.
5. Unpin the holiday post on Facebook.
6. Check Bing, Yelp and Apple Maps for stale hours.
7. Re-record the voicemail if it mentions Christmas.

Step one is the one that matters most. Checking the settings shows what you entered; searching as a customer shows what is actually on display, including changes nobody at the business made.

Hours are one of several dated details covered in your footer still says 2018.

Frequently asked questions

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