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Business hours mistakes that cost you the most calls

Getting found 6 min read

The opening hours errors that send callers to somebody else, and how to keep your listing, your website and your door in agreement.

It is four o'clock on a Saturday and somebody a mile away is looking at your listing on their phone. It says closed. You are sitting in the van with nothing on until Monday.

That call was as good as won and the hours field gave it away. Hours are the least interesting thing on a business listing and the one that does the most quiet damage when they are wrong.

Closed works as a filter

People narrow local results to what is open now, and a listing showing closed drops out of that view and gets skipped in the rest of it. There is nothing to read and nothing to weigh up. The person is not judging you. They are not going to call a closed business at the moment they need somebody.

That is what makes wrong hours expensive. Most mistakes on a profile cost you a bit of persuasion. This one removes you from the list before the persuading starts.

Holiday hours are the ones that catch everybody

The ordinary week is usually right. It is the public holiday, the days between Christmas and the new year, the Monday you took off for a wedding and the week in August that go wrong.

Google can show a note saying the hours might differ when it is not confident about them, and that hedge is itself a reason for somebody to call the next business along. The fix is dull. Sit down once with a calendar, put special hours in for every holiday and closure you already know about for the year, and set a reminder in November to do the next year.

Do not publish hours you are not going to keep

Nine to five looks better on a page than nine to three, so people write nine to five and then finish at three on a Friday. The person who drives over and finds the lights off is angrier than the person who never came, and now their annoyance has somewhere to go.

Publish the hours you will actually hold in an ordinary week and use special hours for the exceptions. Promising less costs you very little here, because somebody who sees that you close at three simply comes at two.

If you go to the customer, hours mean when the phone gets answered

For a mobile trade there is no door to be open, which makes the field feel meaningless until you treat the hours as the times when somebody calling you will get a person.

If that is seven in the morning until eight at night, say so, and then answer at seven. If it is genuinely eight until six with the phone off afterwards, say that instead. Then put one plain sentence on your website about what happens outside those hours, because "closed" and "after six it goes to my cell phone and I answer if I am not under a sink" are very different messages to a person with water coming through a ceiling.

The places your hours live, and they all have to agree

Your listing, your website and the sign on the door. Add whatever social page you have and the mapping app on the other phone platform, and there are five of them.

They drift apart one at a time, and the visitor will believe whichever one happens to be wrong. Write the true set down once, in one place, and copy it everywhere in the same sitting. Then change them all in the same sitting too, on the day the hours change rather than the following month when you remember.

Open twenty-four hours, and what that commits you to

If the listing says twenty-four hours, the phone has to be answered at two in the morning, not diverted to a voicemail box nobody listens to.

Emergency work is worth having and an hours field you cannot honor is the wrong way to advertise it. Ordinary hours on the listing, an emergency number that reaches a person, and a sentence saying which nights that covers, gets you the same calls without the ones you sleep through and the review that follows.

Temporarily closed, and the setting that outlives its purpose

Marking yourself temporarily closed is the honest thing when you are shut for two weeks for surgery or a refit. What happens next is that people forget the setting exists, reopen the doors, and leave the listing saying closed for the next eight months while wondering where the calls went.

Permanently closed is worse, because getting a listing back from it is slow and unpleasant. Never use it for a holiday. Check the setting occasionally even if you never touched it, because listings get changed by suggested edits from the public and by Google's own reading of other sources.

Look at your listing from somebody else's phone once a month

Not the editing screen, which shows you what you meant to say. The public listing, on a phone that is not yours, on a Saturday.

It takes a minute. Are the hours right for this week. Does it say open when you are open. Has anything appeared that you did not put there. Once a month is enough, and doing it on the first Saturday turns it into a habit rather than a task you keep deferring.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

Does having the wrong hours on Google hurt me

It costs you the calls from people filtering for open now, and it sends anybody who turns up at a closed door to somebody else. What it does to your ranking is not something anybody outside Google can tell you honestly.

Should I set my listing to open twenty-four hours if I do emergency work

Only if the phone is genuinely answered through the night. Otherwise put your real hours up and describe the emergency arrangement in words on your website.

How do I set holiday hours

They are the special hours in your Business Profile and you can enter them months ahead. Doing a whole year in one sitting is the only version that survives a busy December.

My hours change from week to week, what do I put

Publish the hours that are true every week, keep them narrow, and use special hours for the rest.

Why does my listing say hours might differ

Google shows that when it is not confident, usually around a public holiday you have not set anything for. Putting the special hours in removes it.

Somebody changed my opening hours and it was not me

The public can suggest edits, and Google also updates listings from other sources. It is not your fault and it is not unusual, and it is the whole reason for the monthly look.

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