Don’t let “Suggested Edits” ruin your online contact info
“User Generated Content” (or Suggested Edits) can ruin your online contact info. In an effort to correct contact info, images, descriptions and broken links, Google and Facebook have asked the public for their input. Regardless if their answers are right or wrong, it’s still being posted almost immediately after submitting.
A vindictive customer could change YOUR contact info, website, hours, address or anything else they wanted. Protect yourself from this! I’ll show you how.
TIP: If you haven’t already claimed your Yelp, Google and Trip Advisor pages, not it NOW! You could actually be locked out of them by someone else if you don’t.
Recently a club that I work for had someone change our online hours in Google. The business is a day club which is only open on weekends. Someone (probably maliciously) changed our hours to be “Closed Saturdays“. Prior to implementing the software I use now, which would have blocked an edit like this, this edit went live in the middle of our peak season!
I caught the edit immediately but when it was fixed, it went into Google’s “pending” status. The pending status lasted almost an entire month costing us countless business.
Bar Marketing Basics has a service that can lock these edits from happening. If someone has a suggested edit that makes sense, we can approve it.
Think of it as a door-man for your online presence.
We recently blocked an edit for another client that changed their main category from “restaurant” to “grocery store”. This edit was probably an algorithm change and not someone trying to be cute.
Without this system in place, this would not have been immediately caught. This business’s Google results quickly would have plummeted for the restaurant category! Blocking these edits is the most important proactive practice you can use to protect your business online.
Furthermore by 2020 websites are said to become obsolete. All of the info we need is on your Google my Business page. This is where you can find contact info, pictures, directions, reviews and even posts. Google is quickly becoming your new website whether you like it or not. You still need a website so there is a “source” of the info but traffic to these sites will drop in the near future. So in an effort to become all things to all people, Google will make it no longer necessary to click through to the end website.