Google Business Profile Hours: How to Set Regular, Holiday and Special Hours

A customer drives across town, finds the shutter down, and takes out their phone. The review they write takes thirty seconds and stays for years. Wrong hours are among the easiest mistakes to avoid on a profile, and among the most expensive. Here is how I would set Google Business Profile hours so that this never happens.

What kinds of hours can you set?

Three, and they do different jobs.

• Regular hours: your normal week, day by day. You can enter two periods for the same day if you close at lunchtime.
• Special hours: a specific date on which your hours differ, or on which you are closed. They replace the regular hours for that day only.
• More hours: for some categories, the hours of a particular service, such as delivery, takeaway, a drive-through or a kitchen. They sit alongside your main hours.

Why set special hours if you are open as usual?

Because on a public holiday, Google may warn customers that your hours might differ. Confirming your hours for that date removes the doubt, even when nothing changes. A customer who reads "hours might differ" often chooses the competitor whose hours are confirmed.

Go through the year once: public holidays, your annual closure, the days around the end of the year. Enter them all in one sitting.

How do you change your hours?

Sign in with the account that manages the profile, search for your business name on Google, and open the editing panel shown above the results. The hours are in the section on your business information. Changes can take some time to appear, and Google may review them.

If you do not manage the profile yet, start with how to create a Google Business Profile.

What should a business open by appointment do?

Enter the hours during which someone can be reached or received, not "24 hours" because you answer emails at night. Google's guidelines ask for the hours when customers can actually be served. For a tradesperson who travels to customers, that means the hours when you take calls and send someone out.

Why did your hours change without you?

Google may update a profile from other sources: suggestions from users, information found on the web. That is one more reason to keep the same hours everywhere. If your website says you close at 6 pm and your profile says 7 pm, sooner or later one of them is "corrected" for you.

Check your profile from time to time and reject a wrong suggestion when you see one.

Where else must your hours match?

• on your website, as text and not only in an image;
• on your door;
• on the directories where you are listed: see NAP consistency;
• on your social media pages.

A local citation checker compares your name, address and phone across directories. Hours are worth checking by hand on the two or three listings your customers use most.

Summary

My opinion: ten minutes a year spent on special hours avoids the one review that every owner dreads, the one that begins with "closed when it said open".