In this period of confinement or curfews, it is essential to know the right way to exceptionally modify your working hours or close your establishments.
Even though most companies don’t fall into the trap of closing their establishments permanently, it’s not easy to choose between special closing times, temporarily closed and reopening at a given date. In this article you will find advantages and disadvantages to each method as well as our recommendations!
Don’t have the time to go through everything? We would recommend you to check out option #4! ?
1. “Permanently closed”: The worst thing to do
This is probably the worst thing to do right now. However, there are many establishments falling into this trap, as it may seem as the most simple way to handle your listing on the Google Business Profile interface.
- Advantage: None, except for it’s easy to do.
- Disadvantage: It will make you lose all of your local SEO, such that when you decide to “Re-open” it, your listing won’t be able to appear in search results for months! It’s even possible that after a long period of time you will not be able to re-open it. Thus causing you to lose all your reviews and information!
2. Changing standard hours: Not a good idea
If you don’t click on “Permanently closed”, and you don’t have that much time to make a decision, your first reflex will probably be to indicate the closed establishment by modifying the so-called “Standard” opening hours. Unfortunately, if you indicate that you’re closed every day, Google will understand that you don’t have any available opening hours and will as such indicate the hours as “Missing” to all users.
- Advantage: It’s less negative in terms of SEO than closing it permanently and it doesn’t require too much time!
- Disadvantages:
- Your customers and prospects won’t know if you are closed or if you just forgot to complete your opening hours.
- You will negatively impact your local SEO in the long-run.
- After some weeks of inactivity, you might have forgotten your previous opening hours, which will make it quite difficult for you to list them all over again when you try to, considering they have disappeared from the system.
3. Planning a store opening: Negative for your SEO?
Some establishments sometimes plan a grand opening event: This is the case for stores like Nike or even Abercrombie! Additionally, on their big day, the store staff has 1,000 things to do other than the planning and creation of its Google listing. Thinking about situations like this, and considering the number of customers that are anticipating the opening of their beloved store, Google has launched a feature that announces such events, making it completely public to users through Google Business Profile!
Several brands, such as GoSport or Uniqlo in New York have used this feature to handle the Covid-19 situation. However, it is not what we advise you to do as it is a deviation of a feature that was not intended for this situation. As such, it has some disadvantages.
Advantages:
- It displays the re-opening date of the establishment
- This retains your standard opening hours, which will be displayed in the classic way at the end of the specific period
Disadvantages:
- This is a feature that can cause bugs on Google Maps. Indeed, since March 23rd, we have noticed the following problem: When a re-opening date is entered by the owner in Google and the algorithm adds a “Temporarily closed” banner, then the Google Business Profile records unfortunately appear as “Permanently closed” on Google Maps ! Note that they normally appear on Google Business Profile. We have even observed that in some cases the listings are impossible to find on Google Maps even with very precise searches, showing that they lose in SEO over the long term.
- Some of the listings that have used this method have disappeared from Google or have been suspended for suspicious behavior.
- This will negatively impact your local SEO in the long-run.
- Your file won’t be indicated as closed but as having “missing hours.”
- Since we don’t have a clear date of reopening, that can potentially be seen as misleading information by some Internet users.
4. Special closing times: The standard method
This is the method officially communicated by Google to adapt to the current situation! Special closing times are used in different cases such as during construction work, during the owner’s absence or in specific cases like the one we are currently facing.
Advantages
- This is the method recommended by Google: It does not affect your SEO and you do not take any unnecessary risks!
- It displays your listings as closed.
- This method will retain your standard opening hours, which will be displayed in the classic way at the end of the period.
Disadvantages
- If you don’t do it with Partoo’s assistance, it requires time as you have to indicate it on a daily basis (either through an “Excel” file for mass modifications or manually for each establishment). If you work with Partoo, simply notify your Customer Success Manager, who will gladly take care of this for you. Otherwise, you may go directly through our interface where you can fill in different periods for several days – which is not available directly on Google Business Profile.
- This does not give the date of re-opening to users. For that, we advise you to make a Google Post : Don’t hesitate to read our article on all the best practices on Google Business Profile during Covid-19 crisis.
5. “Temporarily closed” : A mysterious feature
Another feature is currently visible on some Google listings like that of one of our clients UGC, the “Temporarily Closed” label!
However, this feature has some problematic behaviors that we have identified. For instance, the label “Permanently Closed” seems to have a mid-term negative impact on the listing, which is linked to a bug on Google Business Profile. At least, that’s what local SEO experts in the United States have indicated to us. Find more about that on this article.
If you still want to use this feature, please note that it is not available through API or Google Business Profile interface. To have your Google Business Profile listing marked “Temporarily Closed”, you need to contact Google Business Profile support – which is currently saturated. Google recently announced that they will make it easy for businesses to mark themselves as ‘Temporarily closed’ using Google Business Profile”, but it seems that the technical implementation is taking longer than expected.
Further support
Apart from this exceptional closure on Google Business Profile, many questions arise in these difficult times. It can be about issues in recovering your listings, duplicates that you are unable to delete or Google Posts that you want to publish to warn your customers on certain subjects (prevention, delivery, specific measures, etc).
The entire Partoo team is therefore at your disposal to answer your questions via e-mail: contact@partoo.fr.
