Arguably, one of the most important things a business can do right now is to communicate with its clients effectively.
Customers are beginning to question the accuracy of a lot of what retailer are presenting to them.
Answers to the questions below could be critical for customers trying to determine which products and services they can still access, or whether they’ll choose you or one of your competitors to patronise.
A new phase is now underway this week that will see restaurants and retailers, among other businesses, re-open or prepare to re-open locations in states that regulations are being lifted.
Consistently has compiled some brief guidance and best practices for local businesses.
Our six tips will guide you on how to maintain accurate, up-to-date listings and local pages as your company prepares to re-open some or all of your retail locations, including special hours, new Covid-19 specific attributes and other restrictions you may need to communicate with customers:
1 – Update business hours: Update special hours or set re-opening dates for temporarily closed locations.
2 – Update local landing pages: Keep pages up to date with more detailed information, and include relevant schema, to build visibility for the services you’re offering.
3 – Revert location names back to normal: Remove any special services you may have added to the business name for locations with limited services.
4 – Use attributes to highlight dining, shopping and healthcare options: These include options for takeaway, delivery, no-contact delivery, yes/no for dine-in, in-store pickup, in-store shopping, drive though and virtual care.
5 – Add links to services and resources: Use local business URLs to include links to specific actions such as online orders or reservations.
6 – Leverage Google Posts: Take advantage of COVID-19 specific post type, What’s New, Offers, and Event post types to share current information.
We suggest spending a LOT of time focussing on getting your opening hours consistent, in the example below, you have a well-known fashion retailer that has not followed the process of having “One Source of Truth” for location data.
There are three different opening hours for this store, physical store, local landing page & GMB. All three are different, can you guess which one’s correct?
This example shows that you have to be consistent, especially coming out of a period where a store has been closed.