Wrong opening hours on Google cost you calls you never hear about

It is 6 pm. You are open until 8. Someone searches for you, Google says “Closed now”, and they go somewhere else. You will never know. There is no missed call, no message, nothing.

Hours are the least glamorous field on a listing and one of the most expensive to get wrong, because Google displays “Closed” in red, in the first line, before anything else.

The four ways it goes wrong

• You changed your hours in the shop and not on Google. Winter hours, a new late night, a closed Monday.
• A bank holiday. Google asks you to confirm holiday hours; if you ignore it, it may show your usual hours, or “hours may differ”, which customers read as closed.
• Someone suggested an edit. Any user can propose new hours, and Google sometimes accepts them without telling you.
• A temporary closure you set during a renovation, two years ago, that is still on.

The five-minute fix

Sign in to your Business Profile. Check the regular hours against the sign on your door. Then open “Special hours” and enter every holiday for the next twelve months, now, in one sitting, including the ones where you are open as usual. Google stops asking, and customers stop guessing.

Profile completeness, hours included, is one of the five pillars in a scan. It also tells you what else the businesses above you have filled in that you have not. See what Watch would tell you about your listing, $29 a month.

Why it is worth checking every week

Because the edit you did not make is the one that hurts. A category, a phone number, an opening time changed by a stranger and accepted by Google looks, from inside the shop, like a quiet week. The only way to catch it is to have something look at the public listing regularly and tell you the day it changes.