Are you prepared for Covid-19? While CoronaVirus has taken on a life of its own, you should always have a plan in place to update your business hours due to any disaster.
Here are three ways that you can update your Google My Business (GMB) my hours. If your business will be or is closed — you have several options and things to consider.
1. Google Recently Rolled Out the Temporarily Closed Label
You will need to contact GMB support and have them mark your listing as temporarily closed. While this is Google’s preferred method, I don’t recommend it.
GMB support is short-staffed at the moment, so you should expect a delay in getting help. While this is fine, if you have one location, it is not ideal if you have or manage more than 10 locations. You also will need to contact support again once your business reopens.
You may experience another delay in getting back in contact with support. While the business is marked as closed, you won’t be able to receive any new reviews, and you won’t show up in the local finder. I honestly don’t know how is this is ideal for businesses or users.
If the Temporarily Closed feature becomes available in the dashboard, I still wouldn’t recommend it. It appears that Google has made some changes this week. The Temporarily closed listings are not showing in the map pack and but will now show in the local finder. It appears that their ranking may be diminished below locations that were not marked as temporarily closed or are missing hours.
2. Mark Your Business as Permanently Closed
You will still be able to manage your listing while it is marked as closed. You again will not be able to receive new reviews either.
3. Holiday Hours
GMB allows you to use holiday hours for special hours. I added two weeks’ worth of holiday hours to mark a preschool as closed. I also followed it up by creating an event Google post. – Read more
