Close a Location Permanently – Yext Help

This article outlines the steps you can take within your Yext account to mark a location as permanently closed. Marking a location as closed is mainly for the purpose of updating the location listings and alerting potential customers to the closure. Please note that marking an entity as closed does not remove services from the listing, or remove the listing from publisher sites. For steps on how to remove services see Remove Services from Entities. For more information about closing a location temporarily, see Close a Location Temporarily.

Note: If your entities also have live Pages associated with them, reach out to your Client Success Manager or Yext Support before you take the steps to mark the location as closed so we can determine the best way to handle your Pages.

To mark an entity as permanently closed:

Click Content in the navigation bar and click Entities.
Click on the entity you would like to close.
- To close multiple entities at once, visit the Edit Entities in Bulk article.
Mark your location as closed.
1. Click Internal Use Only in the left sidebar.
2. Click on the Closed field and select Yes from the drop-down. Then, click Save. This will push an update to publisher sites to mark the location as closed. Note that not all publishers support a ‘Closed’ status or banner.
Update your hours to closed.
1. Click on the Hours field.
2. Select Closed from the drop-down next to each day of the week.
3. Click Save.
Update your business name.
1. Click on the Name field.
2. Enter ‘- CLOSED’ after the business name.
3. Click Save
Update your Business Description.
1. Click on the Business Description field.
2. Update the description to include a note that the location is closed.
3. Click Save.

Other recommendations:

We recommend updating the Website field to link to a main corporate page, instead of the page for the specific location that is closed.
We also recommend using the Featured Message to enter a short note about the location’s closure, and using the Featured Message URL to point to a nearby location, or the main corporate website.’
If the entity is Live on Pages, you also have the option to update the Announcement bar module to call out that the location is closed.

Managing subscriptions for closed locations:

Marking an entity as closed does not remove the license from the entity. To remove services, Yext users need to remove the license directly. Marking an entity as closed also does not remove the listings from any of the publisher sites.
We recommend keeping closed locations on an active subscription for at least 4 weeks. This allows enough time for the search engines to make the necessary updates, and for the listings to fall out of the SERP. To remove services automatically on a specific date, see Remove Services from Entities.

People Entities:

For people entities, because the person is no longer associated with the business, and the location itself is not closing, you do not need to mark the person entity as closed. You can simply remove the license. For steps to remove services, see Remove Services from Entities.
Depending on what the person is going on to do, you can also transfer ownership of the listing on Facebook and Google Business Profile to that person so they can manage it on their own moving forward. This will need to be done directly on the sites. For more information see, Transfer primary ownership of a listing in the Google Business Profile help center.

Organizing your account:

As locations will continue to close periodically, we have a few suggestions for how to organize your account, and how to easily mark other locations as closed when needed.
- Create a Template for Closed Entities
  - These templates can be applied to closed locations in the future to help you easily make the necessary updates. We recommend creating an Entity Template that includes all of the necessary content changes you would like displayed for a closed store. See, Create an Entity Template for steps to create a template.
- Create a folder structure to manage closed locations
  - We recommend creating a folder that is dedicated to closed locations. This way you can separate them from the rest of your entities. Note that moving an entity into a ‘closed’ or ‘inactive’ folder does not automatically mark it as closed or remove the license.
  - We recommend creating one folder (e.g., ‘Closed’) for locations that are marked as closed, but still have licenses assigned to it. Then, we also recommend creating another folder (e.g., ‘Inactive’) for locations that are closed and no longer have licenses assigned to them.
    - Note: For locations that do not have licenses assigned to them, you can also remove them from your account altogether. To do this, see Remove Entities.