Your holiday hours are a marketing problem now

It is late October. That means there are about four weeks until Thanksgiving, eight until Hanukkah, nine until Christmas. And somewhere on your Google listing, your Facebook page, and your website, your hours say whatever they said in June. Same schedule. Same days off. No mention that you will be closed the Friday after Thanksgiving or open late on Christmas Eve.

Your customers will not find that out until they pull into your parking lot. Or worse, until they call a dead number at four in the afternoon on the 23rd and drive somewhere else.

Every year this happens. Every year owners tell themselves they will update it later. Later is now. The people searching for you in December are the people who spend the most, tip the best, and remember who was open. This is the busiest buying season of the year, and half the independent businesses in your zip code will have wrong information online during it.

Here is what a correct December looks like. Every place your hours appear shows the actual December hours, including the holidays you close and the days you open early or late. Every place your menu appears has the holiday version, if you run one. Your Google listing has the special hours flagged, not just typed into a post that disappears in a week. Your reviews get answered, because December searchers read reviews harder than anyone else all year.

This is not a website redesign. It is thirty minutes of work, tops. Claim the listing. Edit the special hours. Swap the menu PDF or the holiday specials photo. Answer the reviews that have been sitting there since September. The businesses that do this win December. The ones that do not spend January wondering why the holidays felt soft.

Here is the pattern I keep seeing. Owners will absolutely nail the in-store experience for the holidays and leave the online version set to June. The lights are up, the playlist is on, the staff is ready, and Google is telling people you close at eight when you close at eleven. You cannot out-hustle wrong information. A customer who drove past you because Google said closed is not coming back in January.

So do the thirty minutes now, not the night before Thanksgiving. Better yet, have someone else do them. This is exactly the kind of chore that should live with someone who does it all day, so you can stay in your kitchen or behind your chair, where you are actually good.

The holidays are already decided for some of your competitors. Make sure they are decided for you too.

You cannot out-hustle wrong information. Fix December online before December gets here.