Standing out within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is just as crucial now as it ever has been, especially for local SEO results. While it may seem inconsequential to your success, one visibility element that ‘slays’ at a local level is the accuracy of your business’ opening hours. The Business Hours Indicator plugin for WordPress lets you display this information in an attractive way. It also comes complete with formatting under the hood that could improve your search rankings.
In this guide, we’ll explore how the Business Hours Indicator plugin can improve the local SERP rankings for your WordPress website, and ultimately drive more foot traffic to your physical location. By the end, you’ll understand how to use the plugin to achieve the goals you set, and you’ll learn some handy tips and tricks along the way.
Understanding local SEO: what it is and why it matters
Before we get into what the Business Hours Indicator plugin can do to boost your local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, let’s talk a little about what local SEO is. We’ll follow up with why you should treat it as a priority, especially if you run a physical location or serve specific geographic areas.
What is local SEO?
In a nutshell, SEO is the specific strategies you use to position your site and its pages as high as possible within SERPs. Local SEO is a specific strategy that focuses those efforts to attract more customers from relevant local searches. In lots of cases, these searches include keywords or phrases targeting a location such as, “Near me” or “In [city name]”:
There are three areas in which local SEO looks to help you increase visibility, and by extension, your search rankings:
- Local pack results. These are three or four listings at the top of the SERPs for local queries alongside a map showing a location.
- Maps results. You may also see business results and listings within a Google Maps search, or if you click a map within the typical Google search results.
- Organic search results. Of course, organic searches will still be relevant, and getting space below the local pack and any ads is still prime “real estate“ for any site.
The question is: Why should you care about any of this? In the next section, we’ll give you the answer!
Why local SEO matters
There’s little more essential than local SEO for businesses. First off, you can appear in front of potential, semi-qualified customers. They’ll likely be searching for the products and services you provide. In turn, this can see your conversion rates soar, due to the high purchasing intent local searches provide.
For instance, when someone searches for a “pizza delivery near me,“ they likely want to order now.
Mobile is the predominant way to browse the web, and many searches on those devices are local. Think about the person looking for a local internet cafe or coffee house. Local SEO is a brilliant way to capture a growing and captive market. You can optimize your costs too, as local SEO hits your budget less than other marketing methods. In many cases, with a high success rate, your outgoings will be next to minimal.
Finally, the constant visibility you stand to gain in local search means you can also grow your credibility and trust. There are myriads of ways this happens, through familiarity in search, local business reviews, accurate information, and much more. Given that many small businesses don’t embrace local SEO as much as they should, it’s you who stands to gain a significant advantage.
Key components of local SEO
There are a number of components and factors that go into local SEO success, across two distinct areas. Of course, it’s all under the umbrella of local SEO, but you can further drill down into two subgroups.
What we’re calling “customer-focused data accuracy“ is essentially making sure people can find you with a minimum of effort. This includes aspects such as:
- Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing. This helps you appear in local pack and Maps results.
- Encouraging customer reviews and ratings on search engines and other platforms.
- Making sure your business name, address, and phone number are accurate and consistent wherever they feature online.
- Ensuring your website provides a perfect experience – on mobile devices, especially.
However, there are also technical SEO considerations to work on. This is more in line with typical content SEO practices, with a twist in some cases:
- On-page SEO, such as content optimization, including meta tags, structuring for local keywords and user intent, and more.
- Developing content that has relevance to your local audience, such as addressing local issues or events.
- Acquiring backlinks from reputable local sources. This could be a Chamber of Commerce, local news sites, community organizations, and others.
- Setting up Schema.org structured data for your site will help search engines understand the key information for your business to display it with greater accuracy.
- Don’t forget to engage with your local community on social media platforms too, as this is crucial outreach.
Of course, central to all of this is accurate business information, including your opening times. It may not seem like it, but this is one of the key pieces of information a physical location needs on a website. In the next section, we’ll discuss why this is.
Understanding the importance of business hours for local SEO
Something that seems inconsequential, such as your business’ opening hours, actually has a vital role to play in bringing customers to your site and through your doors.
When it comes to local SEO, there are a few ways displaying these business hours can benefit you:
- For those who carry out local searches on mobile devices, your business hours could be the only roadblock between the customer and a sale.
- Displaying up-to-date hours helps potential customers plan their visits too. Less frustration and greater satisfaction will have a positive impact on your sales metrics.
The big factor though, are search engine “signals“. For instance, the likes of Google and Bing use your stated business hours as a ranking factor for local search results – especially for “near me“ queries.
For this reason alone, you’ll want to ensure your own business hours are accurate, current, and dynamic based on the various holidays across the calendar year.
Introducing the Business Hours Indicator plugin
There’s a viable approach to adding your business’ opening hours to your WordPress website: simply type them into a page. However, this comes with a few drawbacks, mainly that you’ll need to constantly make updates. This could introduce errors and inaccuracies, which will erode any good local SEO progress.
Moreover, this does not generate the necessary markup behind the scenes for Google to recognize that you are providing opening hours.
Instead, a WordPress plugin such as Business Hours Indicator could be the best solution. This is a versatile and straightforward plugin that lets you display your business hours in an attractive and dynamic way.
It offers a whole host of features and functionality to help you showcase your opening times:
- The plugin’s design matches your theme without much additional effort, so you can get back to business-critical tasks.
- You have support for multiple locations, which is ideal if you run several branches or service areas.
- The same functionality also lets you specify and showcase times for special hours, holidays, vacations, and even breaks in the working day.
- You don’t need to make changes or switches when you open or close. The plugin does this work for you.
Best of all, a single-site license is 40 USD per year, which gives you access to the full feature set available.
Implementing the Business Hours Indicator plugin for maximum SEO impact
Using the plugin is a breeze too. The quickest way to begin once you install and activate the plugin, is to head to the Settings > Business Hours Indicator screen within WordPress:
From here, you can begin to explore the various customization options at your disposal. We’ll cover some cool tricks, tips, and use cases across the rest of the article. To simply display your business hours, consider grabbing the shortcode for the table from the Codes tab within WordPress.
This will let you display your opening hours almost anywhere on your site. We recommend you find a prominent location, such as your homepage, contact page, footer, and maybe even on each individual WooCommerce product page.
The plugin carries out some of the technical work that you’d otherwise have to do. This includes implementing structured data, optimizing its layout for smaller screens, and more. Plus, you have more consistency with your other marketing platforms and could see a better “connection“ between them.
Leveraging the plugin’s advanced functionality to enhance SEO
At its core, the Business Hours Indicator plugin gives you almost everything you need to display your opening times on your WordPress website. However, it’s the little things that make the plugin a standout and near-essential choice for your site.
For instance, the Hours tab within the plugin’s settings is more flexible than it first appears. Yes, you can use it to simply enter your business hours and showcase them. Consider, though, that those times of business are dynamic depending on myriad factors. A clue on the scope comes in the form of the Add Location button:
If you run multiple branches, each location could have its own dedicated page on your site complete with a separate entry for its business hours. Even if your opening times are the same between branches, this is still a good idea to help target customers in those geographical areas.
A typical use case for the plugin is to set up unique opening hours for holiday periods. Even this could offer more flexibility than you’d think. For example, you may offer seasonal opening hours – think Christmas and other religious times of the year.
There are more things the plugin can help you achieve, and we’ll cover some of them throughout the rest of the post. First, let’s take a detour in order to discuss how all of this can enhance your local SEO.
Integrating your business hours with other local SEO strategies
The Business Hours Indicator plugin is great as a standalone tool, but it has an even greater effect once you slot it into your own local SEO strategy.
Sometimes, this will be simply offering consistency between your various information channels. You’ll want to claim your Google My Business listing and optimize it in full. The plugin somewhat mirrors Google My Business’ “special hours“ functionality, so this is one area you’ll want to pay attention to:
The extension of this is to build your local citations with other directories and sites. We encourage you to submit your business information (of course, including your opening hours) wherever is relevant to you. The important goal is to be consistent across every platform to build trust with search engines.
This is where Schema.org markup comes in useful. Business Hours Indicator applies this under the hood for you. It’s data with a structure that search engines will use to build rich snippets, along with other cards and panels within results.
You could also link related content to your business hours. For instance, you could encourage customers to leave reviews that mention their experience during specific business hours. It’s vital to also respond to these reviews, and treat this as a support channel if any concerns arise.
Finally, your on-site content should also begin to reference your business hours. This could be specific blog posts, but there are other typical approaches. For example, you could promote “night owl“ or “early bird“ promotions.
The strategy for you is to connect everything that mentions or could mention your business opening hours. Eventually, you can begin to find out if your strategy is developing traction.
How to measure the impact of displaying your business hours on your local SEO
The good news is that studying your local SEO success follows a similar path to your general-purpose SEO. You’ll want to carry out a “control“ study first, without using the Business Hours Indicator plugin. This will give you a baseline.
This is also a good point to set up conversion tracking if you need to. How you do this depends on the actions that are important to you, such as phone calls or directions requests. Again, taking a baseline measurement before you implement the plugin will help you later.
From there, you can install the plugin, use it for a period of time, then assess the results in the following ways:
- Local search rankings. Track your position in local search results for your chosen keywords. In particular, pay attention to local pack and map results changes.
- Your Click-Through Rate (CTR). While you should dissect CTR changes from SERPs as always, also monitor any new appearances in rich snippets or quick answer cards.
- Website analytics. Your good old analytics can tell you a lot here. Keep tabs on those pages that display your business hours to look for any patterns of user behavior. Two good metrics to monitor are a decrease in bounce rate and an increase in time on site.
Remember to also monitor your customer feedback. This could take many forms. You might simply read any recent reviews, although there are more complex approaches to take. Social media outreach may be beneficial, or a dedicated website form to collect any insights into how accessible your business hours are.
Enhance your local SEO using the Business Hours Indicator plugin
Implementing the Business Hours Indicator plugin on your WordPress site isn’t a luxury. It can give you a leg up when it comes to improving your search rankings, CTRs, and more. It’s a first-ballot plugin for your site when it comes to local SEO.
In a nutshell, the plugin does not only let you set opening hours for your business, but it also gives you ways to showcase dynamic information. You’re able to display when your business is open or closed, any specific holiday opening hours, and more. The best news is that this takes a minimal number of clicks to set up and use.
What kind of impact do you think displaying your business hours has on your local SEO? Let us know in the comments section below!
