Opening hours, special hours, and the ranking cost of getting them wrong

Hours are the field nobody thinks about, filled in once at setup and never revisited. They are also one of the few fields that can remove you from a set of results entirely, and one of the few that can get your listing suspended.

What the field actually does

Three things, and the third is the one that surprises people.

• It tells customers whether to bother calling. Obvious, and the least consequential of the three.
• It filters. Searches carrying an urgency signal, and the open now filter, exclude businesses that are shut. If you are closed, you are not in that set at all.
• It makes a claim about your premises. Google's guidelines require a displayed address to be staffed during your stated hours. Your hours are therefore a statement about who is where, and that is what makes this field a compliance issue rather than a convenience one.

Four mistakes, in order of how much they cost

1. Open 24 hours with a home address showing

A sole trader who takes emergency calls at night, with a home address displayed and hours set to 24 hours, is publishing a claim that someone is at that address to receive customers at 3am. Nobody is, and this is one of the most common suspension triggers in the trades.

The fix is not to shorten your hours and lose the emergency searches. It is to hide the address and set service areas, which is the correct setup for a mobile business anyway. The 24 hour claim is then about your availability rather than about a building.

2. Hours that are aspirational rather than real

Open until 6pm because that is when you would like to be reachable, when in practice the phone stops being answered at 4:30 and the last two calls of the day go to voicemail.

The direct cost is a customer who rang during your published hours, got nothing, and called the next business. The indirect cost is worse, because that is exactly the experience that produces a one star review about a business that never called back.

3. No special hours over holidays

The special hours field exists for public holidays and temporary changes, and it is almost universally ignored. Two things go wrong when it is. It bites hardest in walk-in trades such as cafes, where somebody arrives at a closed door and writes about it.

If you are closed and have not said so, customers arrive at a locked door, and that produces the most reliably furious reviews in existence. If you are open when everyone else is closed, and you have not said so, you have thrown away the single least contested trading day of your year.

4. Not marking temporary closures

Shut for two weeks in January, or closed for a refit. Say so, using temporary closure rather than editing your hours to nothing and certainly rather than marking the business permanently closed.

Permanently closed is a different flag, it is displayed to everyone who finds you, and undoing it is more work than setting it. Businesses have used it for a two week holiday and spent a month getting back.

The 24 hours question, answered properly

Should you set your hours to 24 hours if you take emergency calls?

Yes, if it is true, and true means a person answers. Not an answering machine, not a message saying we will call you in the morning. If someone rings at 2am and a human responds, you are open at 2am and the emergency searches at 2am are yours.

If they are not, the claim is false, the address problem above applies, and you will collect reviews from people who called an emergency plumber at 2am and got a voicemail. That is a worse outcome than not appearing.

A short annual routine

1. 01Check your standard hours against what actually happens. Ask whoever answers the phone rather than deciding from memory.
2. 02Enter every public holiday for the next twelve months into special hours. It is the highest-return five minutes on the whole listing checklist.
3. 03Confirm your address setup matches your hours: shown and staffed, or hidden with service areas.
4. 04Check your homepage and contact page say the same thing. A contact page contradicting your listing is a small inconsistency with no upside.
5. 05Diarise it for the same week next year.

If your address arrangement is the part you are unsure about, service area or street address covers the decision, and the suspension recovery order covers what happens when the two disagree for long enough.