Is your Google Business Profile still Temporarily closed?

Thursday morning, late September. Tienda Vera, a shop in Vélez-Málaga, rolled its shutter back up on 1 September after three weeks closed in August. The month has been quieter than you expected, and you have put it down to the heat, the school run, whatever. Then one of the regulars comes in with her shopping trolley and says, as if it were nothing: “Oh, you’re open? Google says you’re closed.”

You take out your phone and search for the shop on Maps. There is the profile, with the good photos and years of reviews, and under the name, right where people look to see whether you are open: Temporarily closed.

She came in because she walks past every day and saw the shutter up. Everyone else does not walk past. They search the name, read that you are closed and do not ring, because nobody calls a closed shop to ask if it is closed. They move on to the next pin on the map, and you never find out they existed.

A status, not a set of hours

In mid-September we wrote about summer hours left in the website footer. This is a different problem, close to the opposite one: the website is right, the hours on the profile are right, and Maps still has you down as closed.

Google keeps hours and status apart. Hours say which days you open and at what times. Status says whether the business is operating at all: open, temporarily closed or permanently closed. Google Maps Help is explicit about it: do not mark a place open or closed based on its hours, because closure is about whether the place is still open for business. Every hour of your week can be spot on and it will not help, because the status is what people read first.

How it got left there

Most often you set it yourself, and in August you set it correctly. The Google Business Profile help page Mark your business as closed is plain about it: if you are closed for more than seven days, for the off-season or indefinitely, use Temporarily closed; for seven days or fewer, set special hours. Three weeks of holiday is squarely the first case. Someone ticked it on a Friday at the end of July so nobody would turn up to a closed shutter, and that was the right call.

What is missing is the second half of the job. The steps Google describes for a temporary closure have no field for a return date, so it never expires. Special hours are set for specific dates; a temporary closure carries no dates at all and stays until someone goes in and takes it off. And on 1 September, with the shutter up, stock to put out and the phone ringing, nobody remembers to log into Google and say you are open again.

The other route is that someone outside set it. Anyone with a Google account can open your listing on Maps, tap Suggest an edit, choose Place closed or not here and mark it Temporarily closed. A neighbour sees the shutter down for three weeks in August and reports it, meaning well. Google reviews those suggestions and decides whether to change the status. Its own help says that when it receives an update that a location is temporarily closed, you may get an email. That email landed in August, in an inbox nobody was reading in August.

What it does while it stays

The person it hurts most is the one who had already chosen you. They are not searching for “deli near me”. They search your name, because they know you, because someone told them, because they bought from you once. They read Temporarily closed and take it at its word. They do not ring to check, they do not message, they do not walk over to look. Calling a place Google says is closed is something hardly anyone does.

Then there are the people who do not know you yet. On the same help page, Google notes that for broad queries, temporarily closed businesses can rank after open ones, and that the effect depends on the category, the type of query and how many matching businesses are temporarily closed. It gives no numbers, and we are not going to make any up. What it does say is that while the status stays on, the map can put you behind the ones that are open.

The five-minute check, phone in hand

Borrow a phone that is not yours. Yours is signed into the business account, so Google shows you the profile as its owner, with prompts and buttons a customer never sees. The phone of whoever is on the counter is ideal, on mobile data with the wifi off.

Search the business name on Google Maps and read out loud what it says right under the name. If it says Temporarily closed, you are done; there is no need to go on. If it shows your hours, do the same on Google Search with the name and the town, which is another way into the same profile.

Then search the way a stranger would: what you sell and the name of the town. See whether you come up, and how.

Last, read three sets of hours one after another: the profile, the website footer and the sticker on the door. If any of the three disagrees with the other two, write it down. The profile, the website and the door have to tell one story, and the status on the profile is the first line of it.

How to clear it

Two minutes, following the help page Mark your business as reopened:

1. Go to your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
2. In the Business hours section, next to Hours, select Edit and choose Open with main hours.
3. Tick the days you open and set the times with the dropdowns.
4. Save.

There is also an Open with no main hours option. We would not use it: hours are exactly what people look at on the profile, and without them they are back to guessing. If you run several locations, Business Profile Manager lets you select them all, go to Actions, then Open, and mark them open in one go.

If the profile is not in your hands, because it was set up with a Gmail address that is no longer yours or an agency that no longer answers, you can suggest the reopening on Maps like anyone else: Suggest an edit, Operating status changed, Reopen. Google says it reviews these edits and that they can take some time to show. Meanwhile the real job is getting access to the profile back, because without it this happens again at the next closure.

The next day, run the check again from the same borrowed phone. Until you have seen it from the outside, it is not done.

When it should stay

Not every Temporarily closed is a slip. Take a small hotel up in the hills, call it Hotel Azahar, that closes from November to February. That is exactly what Google describes as closing for the off-season, and the status exists for it: someone who searches the name in January sees the closure is temporary rather than final, and does not drive up to find the gate locked. Google’s help puts it in those terms, as a way to spare customers the disappointment of finding out at the door. The same goes for a refurbishment with no end date.

What makes no sense is using it for something it is not. A week off for the fair, the December bank holidays or 15 August belong in special hours, set for those dates and no others. And closing in the afternoons is a matter of hours, not status.

The working rule is a single one. On the day you mark the temporary closure, put the day you will take it off in the calendar. The hotel that closes in November already knows it reopens in March. Make sure its profile knows too.

If you would rather we did it

If the status was the only thing wrong, you do not need us: clear it in two minutes and run the check again tomorrow. If the check showed you more, like one set of hours on the profile, another on the website and a third on the door, that is where we come in. Presence (€3,450) gets the profile, the website and the door telling the same story: the same status, the same hours, the same details. Bookings (€5,450) adds appointments or reservations on your own domain. Operator (€7,950) is the size above, for when messages are already coming in and somebody has to answer them. Care (€149/month) is who puts the reopening in the calendar the day the closure goes on, and checks Maps from someone else’s phone when you are back from holiday; it travels with the work, not an extra you drop to save money.

Web & eCommerce packages. A person writes back within 24 hours.