Rebranding a location

[Ted J.]

Hello everyone, I'm hoping to get some advice on a potentially complex situation. Who's up for the challenge?

Some background:
My wife and I own a gift shop in Portland, Oregon called "Hello! Good Morning!" We started with one location, I'll call it Broadway St. Then we opened in a second location, inside another store called Cargo which rents out some of their massive space to other vendors. So now we have 2 businesses with listings for each location with Yelp and Google.

We've decided to rebrand our Broadway location. Our second location has much better sales. So with our first location on Broadway, we want to try something different. We want to do occasional events like Pop-Up Shops, Kid's workshops or holiday markets. We're talking one weekend a month probably. We'll be using it as an e-commerce hub the other days of the month. So essentially, it's like an event space with irregular hours but it's only for our events with our collaborators and it's not for rent like a traditional event venue.

I'm not worried about ranking high for "Event Venue" since I'm not renting it out to other people. It's not an ideal category, but I'm guessing it might be the best. It would be great if there was a category called "Pop-Up Shop" where I didn't have to maintain hours to keep my listing from being marked "permanently closed".

I'm not sure what my options are. I want to retain all of my reviews and photos for that Broadway location but I would be happy to merge them to my other location.

Some of my questions are:

1. Should I list my Broadway location as an "Event Venue" or might there be a better category? (It'll have to be a category that doesn't require listing set hours.)

2. If I change the category of my Broadway shop to "Event Venue", will Google and Yep allow me to list the business without set hours?

3. I know I can merge my reviews and photos to my other location on Google, but how would I do that on Yelp? Just change the address? Then I might have 2 listings. (If I did, I would be ok with losing my 2nd location reviews because I only have one review so far).

4. Is there a better solution?

Thanks in advance for putting your collective brainpower to this one!! I really appreciate it.

Best,
Ted

 

[JoyHawkins]

Hey Ted,

So what would a consumer see when they show up at this location during normal business hours. Let's say someone randomly drops by. Would there be staff there working that could talk to them?

 

[Ted J.]

Hi Joy!

To be honest, we haven’t totally figured that out. It won’t look like a typical retail window, fully dressed unless it’s prior to a pop up market weekend. It will probably look more like half retail/ half workspace.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'm not certain Google will move the reviews unless you tell them to move the listing and that the location is shutting down. Then create a new listing once that's taken care of. I'd suggest the new listing have a different name. For the hours, you might raise some red flags if you leave them off. Online businesses are not allowed listings and I can see the listing getting suspended if it appears that way. Since you said the location is staffed, you should set the hours for when the staff are there. When you have events, mark up the events on your website with schema so that they show up as events in the Knowledge Panel.

 

[Ted J.]

Hi Joy,

Thanks for your response! This location won't be staffed on a regular basis. It will only be open (and staffed) approximately one weekend a month for special events like Pop-Up Shops, kids' workshops, etc. That's why I was hoping listing it as an "Event Venue" as a Google category would allow me to only list hours for the events and not have regular hours.

Thank you,
Ted

 

[JoyHawkins]

Hey Ted,

So I'm afraid then the location wouldn't actually eligible for a listing. It's only eligible if it's staffed regularly.

 

[Ted J.]

Ok. Thanks for the info, Joy! So, I guess I will move and merge my google listing to my other location. What would you recommend doing with my Yelp listing? I was thinking I could just change the address to my other location but then I would have 2 Yelp listings. But since I only have one review on that other listing, I would be ok deleting it later.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Yeah I would suggest merging both.

 

[Ted J.]

Thanks Joy, I appreciate you taking the time.