Here’s a quick question that most business owners in Charleston never think to ask: are the hours on your Google listing actually right?
It sounds too simple to matter. But wrong hours are one of the most common things we fix on Google Business Profiles, and they cost you calls you never hear about. A customer looks you up at 4:45 on a Saturday, Google says you’re closed, and they call the next business on the list. You never knew they were looking.
With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, and hurricane season running through the end of November, now is a good time to take five minutes and check.
Start with your regular hours
Pull up your business on Google the way a customer would. Search your business name on your phone and look at the hours shown in your listing. Then ask yourself a few honest questions:
- Do these match the hours on your door and your website?
- Did you change your hours at some point and forget to update Google?
- Does Google show you open at lunch when you actually close for an hour?
- If you’re a service business that answers the phone after the shop closes, do your hours reflect when people can actually reach you?
Google pulls information from a lot of places, and it doesn’t always get it right. Sometimes a customer suggests an edit and Google accepts it. Sometimes hours were set up years ago by someone who no longer works for you. Either way, the only way to know is to look.
Don’t forget Saturday
Saturday is where we see the most mistakes. A lot of Lowcountry businesses keep shorter weekend hours, open by appointment only, or close on Saturdays in the summer and open again in the fall. If your Google listing still shows the old pattern, you’re either turning away people who would have come in, or sending people to a locked door. Both hurt. The second one tends to turn into a bad review.
Holiday hours: Thanksgiving and Christmas
This is the big one for the next couple of months. Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26 this year, and Christmas lands on a Friday. Lots of businesses close early on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, close the Friday after, or take the whole week between Christmas and New Year’s.
If you don’t tell Google, it will show your normal hours. Customers in Mount Pleasant or West Ashley who drive over the day after Thanksgiving will find you closed, and they won’t be happy about it. On the flip side, if you’re open when your competitors aren’t, holiday hours on Google are a simple way to pick up that business.
Storm closures need special hours too
Anyone who has been in Charleston a while knows the drill. A storm heads our way, the county talks about evacuations, and businesses close for a day or three. When that happens, update Google. People search for what’s open during and after a storm, and accurate information helps them and helps you.
For a short closure, special hours are usually a better tool than marking the business “temporarily closed.” Special hours cover specific dates and then go back to normal on their own, so you don’t have to remember to switch anything back once the power is on and you’re open again.
How to set special hours in Google Business Profile
It takes a couple of minutes. Here’s how:
- Sign in to the Google account that manages your business and search your business name on Google, or open the Google Maps app.
- Click or tap Edit profile, then go to the Hours section.
- Find Special hours. Google sometimes shows upcoming holidays right there with a prompt to confirm them.
- Pick the date, then choose Closed or enter the hours you’ll be open that day.
- Add as many dates as you need and save.
While you’re in there, look over your regular hours too. If you want a fuller walkthrough of everything else in your profile, our Google Business Profile optimization guide covers it step by step.
Why this matters more than it seems
Google wants to send people to businesses that are actually open. When your hours are accurate, people trust what they see, they call or drive over, and the listing does its job. When your hours are wrong, you lose the customer and you usually never find out. There’s no missed call to look at. They just went somewhere else.
Hours are one small piece of how you show up in local search, but they’re one of the easiest pieces to get right. If you’re curious how the rest of it works around here, we wrote about what moves local rankings in the Lowcountry.
Want a second set of eyes on your listing?
If you’d like us to look over your Google Business Profile, hours and all, call us at (843) 582-0690 or request a free audit. We’ll tell you what we see in plain English, and you can decide what to do from there.