Six weeks left: posts, reviews and January

Six weeks left. Black Friday is two weeks out, the last ordinary working week of the year ends on the nineteenth of December, and after that the calendar belongs to whoever is still open and still answering.

Two jobs run side by side from here. One is catching the demand that is already moving, which is mostly an accuracy problem, and the short version of that is to put every holiday closure you already know about into the special hours field this week and then move on. The other is building the demand that shows up in the first two weeks of January, which is mostly a patience problem, because nothing you publish in November pays out until then. This post is about the second job, with December’s posts and reviews in between.

Posts are actually read in December

For most of the year we are lukewarm on profile posts. In the holiday stretch they earn their place, because people are checking hours and offers on the listing panel rather than on your website, and a current post sits right there while they look.

What we publish weekly from now until the new year:

1. The holiday schedule, as a plain post with the dates written out. This is the one that gets read.
2. One offer that is honest, with a start and end date and a link that goes straight to the booking or ordering page.
3. An event, if you have one, using the event post type so the dates show.

A post with a date, a sentence and a working link beats a graphic with the words baked into the image. Nothing that reads the listing can read text inside a picture.

Review recovery, not review collection

December produces the worst reviews of your year. Short staff, long waits, a wrong order, an appointment moved twice. That is not a sign anything is broken, it is what volume does, and the practices and restaurants we work with all see it.

The response is recovery, which is two habits, not one:

• Reply to every bad review inside a day. Short, plain, no defensiveness, no clinical or order detail in public, then an invitation to sort it out directly. The reply is not written for the reviewer, it is written for the next person reading.
• Keep asking, right through the busy weeks. A steady trickle of recent, specific reviews is what makes a single angry one look like the exception it is. The ask has to land at the moment of relief: the job finished, the table cleared, the appointment done, not three days later in a newsletter.

The FTC rule on fake reviews and testimonials has been in force for a year now, so the guardrails are not optional. No gating, meaning you do not screen for a happy answer before showing the review link. No incentive tied to what the review says. No staff or family reviews without disclosure. No buying anything. If a vendor is offering you a review service that works around any of that, the risk is yours, not theirs.

And the quiet one: reviews are being read by software as much as by people now. The phrases customers use come back in the answers search gives about you, which is one more reason to ask for specifics rather than stars. That is ordinary review work, just with a bigger audience than it had.

January is built in November

Whatever ranks in January was published and linked weeks earlier. A page takes time to be crawled, indexed and settled, and the first week of January is the worst possible week to begin, because by then the people you compete with are already running.

The demand itself is predictable by trade, and it is the same list every year:

• dental benefits reset, and the people who ran out of coverage in October come back
• gyms, studios and wellness clinics get the resolution wave, which in the accounts we run fades well before the end of February
• home services get the first hard freeze calls, whenever that lands
• remodelers get the inquiries that start with “this year we are finally going to”

Predictable demand is the easiest kind to prepare for, and the only reason it does not get prepared for is that November is busy. Five things we build this month and hold until January:

1. The page the January search will actually land on. Not a post about the new year. The service page for the thing people buy in January, with the January reason for buying it written into the first two paragraphs rather than into a headline.
2. Links to it from the pages that already get traffic. A new page with nothing pointing at it waits to be found. Two or three internal links from your busiest pages is the whole job and it takes ten minutes.
3. The campaign built and paused. Copy approved, budget signed, negatives loaded, conversion action checked. Nobody approves a budget in the first week of January, and every week you spend waiting for that approval is a week of the only season your competitors are also fighting for.
4. The reactivation message written now and sent then. What you say to the people who did not book in the autumn is much easier to write in a quiet week than in a loud one. Draft it in November, schedule it for the second week of January, and keep it specific about a time rather than a discount.
5. A plan for the week you reopen. The first two days back are the loudest of the quarter and the desk is usually short. Decide now who answers, and decide what happens to a call that rings out, because in January that call is somebody with a fresh deductible and a list of three businesses.

The patience part is that none of this pays out until January. That is exactly why it gets skipped, and why the businesses that do it start the year in front.

What to do this month

• Schedule three profile posts: the holiday schedule, one honest offer, and an event if you have one.
• Write the January page this week and link it from the two pages on your site that already get the most traffic.
• Set a rule that every review gets a reply within a day, and name the person responsible while the owner is away.
• Put the review ask into the moment the job ends, not into a monthly email.
• Draft the January reactivation message now and schedule it for the second week of the month.
• Get the January ad budget approved before the twentieth of December.

December work protects the money already in the building. January work decides whether the year opens with a full book or with a team making calls. The second one is the half that gets skipped, and it is nothing more than local search done early, on a business profile somebody is actually looking after.