Black Friday is less than a week away. If you’re shopping, it means you’re making your list (or putting off making your list) and maybe wondering why so many of your family members had to be born between Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you’re selling, it means you’ve hit the do-or-die part of the year—the massive sales push that happens between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Whether you’re selling books, toys, cars, or pretty much anything else, this is the season you prepare for all year—people are hitting the streets, cash in hand, and buying like maniacs.
That is, if they can find you.
Maybe all your other advertising is working—you have great ads on TV, radio, on Facebook, and all over the internet (we can help you with that!). People are paying attention, they like what they’re seeing, and they’re interested in buying what you’re selling. When they’re ready to buy, they’ll pull out their phones, do a quick search to figure out where you are and when you’re open, and they’ll hit the road, fully intending to exchange their hard-earned money for the goods and services you can provide.
This is where things can go off the rails.
If the information they find online about your business isn’t accurate, all their good intentions will turn into negative feelings very quickly. Maybe your address is outdated, and they arrive at an empty storefront—or, worse, a new store in your place. Maybe your hours online are incorrect and they arrive to find you closed. Either way, they’ve wasted a trip and you’ve blown a shot at a sale thanks to an incorrect business listing.
As if that wasn’t stressful enough, there are dozens of sites online listing your business’s information. So when you move to that great new location, or you extend your hours for the holidays, it’s not as simple as just updating your Facebook profile. You need to track down every last one of your old listings and update it to make sure that people are finding you in the real world, no matter where they find you online.
Good news: you don’t actually have to manually change every last one of your business listings yourself. You can if you want to, but if you’re a business owner, you probably have better things to do this time of year. We have a service called Zipie Scan that’s built to make the entire business listings process easy and painless for you. Here’s how it works:
- Check yourself. Head over to our Zipie Scan page and pop in your business’s information to see if your listings are, in fact, correct. It’s fast and free and it’s something we recommend everyone do this time of year.
- Look over your listings. If everything’s correct, breathe a sigh of relief and sleep a little easier knowing that everyone who wants to find you can do so easily and accurately. If everything isn’t correct, though—
- Let us do the work. We’re here to help when it comes to business listings. Our digital team will comb through all your listings, ensuring that everything is accurate and up-to-date. We’ll also do things like make sure all listings are claimed and under your control (sometimes they’ve been listed by other people—that can get messy). And if you need to change anything back after the holidays, we can handle that too. Whether your customers are searching for you on Yelp, Facebook, Google, or any of the other dozens of sites out there with your information on it, we’re here to make sure they can find you.
When the information about your business is correct online, it means more feet in the door, more sales, more money in your pocket, and less frustration for people who really do want to give you their money. Start with a quick business listing scan—it’ll make for a happier holiday season for you and your customers, we promise.
