Your opening hours are wrong somewhere

Your opening hours and your phone number are published in more places than you edit them. Change them on your website and the Google listing does not hear about it. Neither does the Facebook page, or the directory somebody added for you years ago. Each of those is a separate account holding its own copy of the same two facts.

Below is a list of the places to look, a twenty-minute search that shows you which copies disagree, and an order to correct them in. Nothing here needs a developer.

Where the same two facts are published

• Your Google Business Profile. The panel beside search results and inside Google Maps.
• Your website. Usually the footer and a contact page, which are two separate edits.
• Your Facebook page, which has its own hours field and its own phone number field.
• Your Instagram bio, and the contact button on a professional account.
• Apple Maps, which is what somebody using the Maps app on an iPhone sees.
• Your booking or appointment system, which decides which times a customer can choose.
• Your answering message, which may still describe a closure from a previous year.
• The printed sign on your door.
• Any directory you were listed in years ago. An industry association's member list, a supplier's page of stockists, a listing somebody added for you.

There are nine on that list, and not every business has all nine. Start with the Google Business Profile. In a local search it sits beside the results and inside Google Maps, showing the hours and offering the phone number as a button to tap. A customer can read both without opening a website at all.

Twenty minutes on your phone

You need your phone and a piece of paper.

1. Open a private window on your phone. In Safari, tap the tabs button and switch to Private Browsing. In Chrome, tap the three dots, then New Incognito tab. Signed in as yourself you see the owner's view, not the customer's.
2. Search your business name, then your name with your suburb, then your trade with your suburb.
3. Write down every phone number and every set of hours you can see. Next to each one, write where it came from. Two columns is enough.
4. Keep scrolling for two or three screens of results, so an older listing further down is not missed.
5. Search your phone number itself, inside quotation marks. That finds pages carrying your number that you have forgotten.
6. Open the Maps app on an iPhone and search your name there. Apple Maps is a separate listing with separate data.

You now have a list. Where two rows disagree, the customer meets whichever one they found first.

Correct them in the order a customer meets them

1. Google Business Profile. Sign in to the Google account that owns the listing, then search your own business name. The editing controls appear above the results.
2. Your booking system, if a customer can book online. Wrong hours here sell an appointment that does not exist.
3. Your website. Footer and contact page. On Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and GoDaddy's website builder the footer is normally one edit that shows on every page. On WordPress it may sit in the site editor, in the theme settings, in a widget area, or typed into the page itself. Check the contact page separately either way.
4. Facebook and Instagram.
5. Apple Maps. Apple's free tool for this is Apple Business Connect, at businessconnect.apple.com.
6. The answering message. Ring your own number from another phone and listen to the whole recording.
7. The sign on the door.
8. Directories, but only the ones that appeared in your search.

Public holidays

A profile showing normal hours on a public holiday sends people to a closed door. Google may also display a note saying the hours might differ. That is what it shows on a holiday when nobody has confirmed the hours for the date, and anyone reading the listing can see it.

The answer is special hours, set against a date rather than a day of the week. In the hours section of your profile there is a place to add hours for a single date, including closed. Enter the whole year in one sitting, using the dates published at nsw.gov.au/about-nsw/public-holidays. Enter the same dates in your booking system, so it cannot take a booking for a day you are shut.

The phone number

A wrong number is one of three kinds, and each one needs different handling.

• A number that forwards. It rings through today, so it passes any test you run. It stops on the day the forwarding is switched off, and nothing announces that. Ring every published number from a phone that is not yours.
• An old mobile. Often a former staff member, or the number used before the business had a landline. A disconnected line at least tells the caller to look again. A number that reaches somebody else does not.
• A number on a page you cannot edit. This one looks unfixable, and often it is not. On Google Maps, open the listing and use Suggest an edit. Anyone can send one, and Google reviews it before deciding. Check at the same time whether the listing can be claimed, because claiming it lets you edit it directly from then on.

A listing that nobody at your business can sign in to belongs with the accounts your business depends on, not with today's twenty minutes.

What is not worth worrying about

• A directory nobody visits. If it did not appear in your own search, a customer is unlikely to find it either. Leave it.
• The same number written a different way. With spaces, or with the country code in front. They all dial. Consistency is tidy, not urgent.
• A Facebook page that duplicates your profile, as long as both are correct. Two accurate listings do not compete with each other.
• Your website appearing below your own Google profile. That is the normal shape of a local search, not a fault.

The habit that keeps it fixed

Whenever your hours change, change them in the same three places, in the same order, every time. Google Business Profile, then the booking system, then the website.

Always those three, always in that order. That way it becomes something you do, not something you remember.

Your next step

Run the search tonight, on your phone, in a private window, and write down what you find. If two rows disagree, you have found something worth an hour this week. There are three more checks worth running while you are there. If you would rather somebody worked through the list with you, that is the kind of work we take on.