Getting Found Online
Your Opening Hours Are a Ranking Signal. Most Businesses Get Them Wrong.
Google treats whether you're open right now as part of how it ranks local results. Here is how hours go wrong, what a locked door costs you, and a ten-minute routine that keeps them right.
8 min readBy Mavlo
Ask a shop owner what their opening hours are and they'll tell you without thinking. Ask what Google says their opening hours are and there's usually a pause. The two drift apart quietly. Nobody notices until a customer does, and by then the customer is standing outside a dark window checking their phone.
Hours feel like admin. They are closer to a ranking factor, a trust signal and a customer-service promise wearing the same coat.
"Open now" is a filter and a factor
Open Google Maps, search for a barber, and you'll see an "Open now" chip at the top. Tap it and every business with no hours, or hours that say closed, disappears. That's the filter. Google also folds the same idea into ordinary results: search for "pharmacy" at 8pm and the map quietly favours the ones it believes are open.
That's the factor. In December 2023 BrightLocal ran a study on opening hours and local rankings across 50 businesses in ten categories. Their headline finding was that "local rankings during each business's opening hours reflect higher local rankings, on average" than outside them. Google's Search Liaison confirmed it on the record the same week: "The team tells me we've long used 'openness' as part of our local ranking systems, and it recently became a stronger signal for non-navigational queries." Non-navigational means someone searching "tyres near me" rather than a particular garage by name.
Google's own tips for improving your local ranking put it more gently. The page says that "businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results", and the first things it lists under complete info are your address and "your business hours, including special opening hours". If you've read how local search ranks, you'll recognise this as the relevance leg of the stool. A profile with no hours isn't relevant to someone who wants to walk in now.
Do not game it
The obvious temptation is to list yourself as open 24 hours. Don't. BrightLocal's own researcher asked whether a couple of positions that shift through the day are "really worth it to mess with your opening hours", and the answer is no. Google can and does correct hours from user reports, and a listing that says open when the door is locked generates exactly the review we're about to talk about.
The three ways hours go wrong
In practice almost every wrong listing falls into one of these.
- Never set. The profile was created, or Google created it from data it found, and the hours field was left blank. Google shows nothing useful, and the "Open now" filter drops you entirely. Common with trades, mobile businesses and anyone who claimed their listing in a hurry.
- Set once, never updated. The hours were right in 2022. Then you stopped opening Mondays, or started closing at four in winter, and the listing still says the old thing. This is the most common one, because nothing prompts you to look.
- Bank holidays. Regular hours say Monday 9 to 5. It's the Spring bank holiday and you're at the coast. Google, absent any special hours, will happily tell everyone you're open. This is the one that produces the angriest reviews, because the customer made a special trip.
There's a quieter fourth: the hours are right on Google and wrong everywhere else. Your website footer, Facebook page and Apple Maps entry each have their own copy, and each one drifts independently. We'll come back to that.
The review that follows a locked door
Picture a bakery on Queens Road in Leicester. Regular hours say open until 4pm on Mondays. It's the August bank holiday, the owner has taken the day, and nobody touched the listing. A family from Oadby drives in for the cinnamon buns they saw on Instagram, parks, walks up, and reads the handwritten sign on the door. What happens next is predictable. They search for somewhere else, and one of them, still mildly annoyed that evening, leaves a two-star review that says "drove all the way in, closed, listing said open".
That review is now the most recent thing on your profile. It isn't about your buns. It's about a field you forgot to fill in. And it stays there long after the bank holiday is forgotten.
Google is candid about this. Its page on marking a business as closed says the point of the "Temporarily closed" status is to spare customers "the disappointment of discovering a closure through an in-person visit". The same logic applies to a single bank-holiday Monday. Google also warns that if it receives reports that your info isn't accurate, it "might update your profile" itself, using reports from various sources. So wrong hours don't stay yours for long. Someone else corrects them, sometimes to something even less accurate, and you get a notification you may not read.
Bank holidays and special hours
Special hours are the fix for the bank-holiday problem, and they're easier than they sound. In your Business Profile, go to Edit profile, then Hours, and you'll find a Special hours section. Google's special hours help page explains that they exist for when hours change "for a brief period of time", and that they cover a business that "temporarily adjusts its hours of operation or remains closed for up to 6 days in a row". Anything longer, use Temporarily closed instead.
The line worth underlining from that page: Google says to "confirm your hours for official holidays, even if they're the same as your regular hours". A Hinckley garage that's open as normal on Good Friday should still say so. Google will suggest the dates, and confirming them removes the hedge that makes people ring first or not bother.
The upcoming bank holidays in England and Wales, per GOV.UK, are:
- Friday 25 December 2026, Christmas Day
- Monday 28 December 2026, Boxing Day (substitute day)
- Friday 1 January 2027, New Year’s Day
- Friday 26 March 2027, Good Friday
- Monday 29 March 2027, Easter Monday
- Monday 3 May 2027, Early May bank holiday
- Monday 31 May 2027, Spring bank holiday
- Monday 30 August 2027, Summer bank holiday
Set them all now, in one sitting. Open or closed, and if open, the actual times. It takes about the length of a kettle boiling and it covers you for a year. Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve aren't bank holidays, but if you close early on them, add those too.
More hours for what you actually do
Regular hours answer "when can I walk in". They don't answer "when can I get a delivery", "when is takeaway on" or "when is the quiet hour for older customers". Google's opening hours guide covers this under More hours: "If you offer specific services with different times such as senior hours, or delivery and takeaway hours, you can set more hours." You'll also find options for drive-through, pickup and happy hour depending on your category.
Two things to know. More hours don't appear until you've set regular hours first, so the order matters. And they should be a subset of your main hours, not an extension. A Belgrave curry house that stops taking walk-ins at 10pm but runs delivery until 11pm has a real question to answer here: are you open at 10.30 or not? Google's answer is to set main hours to 11pm and takeaway or dine-in hours to 10pm, so nobody arrives at a shuttered front while the kitchen is still cooking.
Same hours everywhere
Your customers don't only look at Google. iPhone users searching in Apple Maps see Apple's copy of your hours. People who found you on Facebook see Facebook's. Directory listings, including the one we hold for you at Mavlo, carry their own. If the four disagree, a customer has no way of knowing which one is true, and Google is comparing them too. This is the same problem covered in the NAP consistency article: name, address and phone need to match everywhere, and hours belong on that list.
Treat Google as the master copy. Update it first, then work outwards. Your website footer is the one most likely to be years out of date, because the person who built the site typed the hours in once and nobody has opened that file since. If your site has a contact page with a table of hours, make sure it's the same table as Google's, down to the lunch break.
The ten-minute quarterly routine
Put a recurring reminder in your calendar for the first Monday of January, April, July and October. When it fires, do this and nothing else.
- Search your own business name on Google, on your phone, as a customer would. Read the hours it shows. Do they match the sign on your door? (Two minutes.)
- Open your Business Profile, go to Hours, and check whether Google has applied any updates you didn't make. Accept or reject them. (Two minutes.)
- Open Special hours and confirm every bank holiday in the next three months, open or closed, plus any planned closure such as a holiday or a refit. (Three minutes.)
- Check More hours still reflect what you actually offer. If you dropped delivery in the spring, remove delivery hours. (One minute.)
- Open your website, Facebook page and Apple Maps entry and compare. Fix whichever one disagrees with Google. (Two minutes, longer if something has drifted.)
That's it. Four times a year, ten minutes each. It's the cheapest thing on the finished listing checklist, and it's the one that stops the review you can't argue with.
What to remember
- Google uses whether you are open as part of local ranking, and the "Open now" filter removes you entirely if hours are blank or wrong.
- Confirm special hours for every bank holiday, even when you are open as usual, so Google stops hedging.
- Set more hours for delivery, takeaway and senior hours, but only after regular hours are in place.
- Keep hours identical on Google, your website, Apple Maps, Facebook and directories, and check all of them once a quarter.
Hours that stay right
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