With many states forcing all but essential businesses to shut down, you may be wondering how to update your Google My Business hours to avoid confusion among customers. Below are three options that you can take when updating your business hours, whether you’re temporarily closing or adjusting your hours of operation.
Google recently released the option to mark your listing as temporarily closed. In order to do this, you must reach out to Google support.
Keep in mind, Google is currently short-staffed and it may take time for your request to take effect. You must also reach back out to Google support to reopen your GMB listing.
While this feature is enabled, your business won’t receive new reviews or may not display as prominently in the local finder. Read our latest article on updating your pin on Google Maps.
You won’t have to reach out to Google support to permanently close your business, but you won’t receive new reviews. I wouldn’t recommend this option, just to avoid customer confusion once the COVID-19 situation begins to improve.
This is my recommended option. GMB allows you to display holiday hours for special hours, which is ideal for folks adjusting hours of operation, or closing temporarily, without relying on Google Support or signaling to customers that your business is permanently out of business. Alongside holiday hours, you can create a Google event post to display within your GMB knowledge panel to further explain the change in your hours.
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If your hours of operation aren’t changing, but you won’t be serving the public within your physical location, Google is now allowing certain businesses such as restaurants the option to add pick up, dine out or carry out to their business name. Google also recently launched new schema markup types for COVID-19 to help businesses better inform their customers, as well as a new tool to make COVID-19 special announcements without using structured data.
To make your business profile appear as temporarily closed on Google Maps and Search, follow these steps:
Here are the steps you need to take in order to enable special hours:
Here are the steps you can take to display your GMB Listing as permanently closed:
Google confirmed that marking a GMB Listing as temporarily closed won’t harm visibility or rankings.
With the most recent Google update, there isn’t any impact to using temporarily closed vs. special hours.
There is no impact on ranking. It’s recommended to keep your customers informed so they don’t show up at your physical location.
It’s recommended to utilize posts to communicate why hours have changed, or why your business has temporarily closed. You can also leverage GMB posts to explain to customers the steps you’re taking to keep employees and customers safe.
Looking for a tool to perform keyword research? Check out my latest article that walks you through the process of how to use SEMRush for keyword research when writing new content, or how to update old content for SEO.