Despite initial concerns that changing a Google My Business listing from ‘open’ to ‘temporarily closed’ would negatively impact visibility and/or organic rankings, Google’s Dan Sullivan has confirmed that this will not be the case.
Many businesses around the world have had to temporarily close their doors as a result of coronavirus, which led to a concerned Twitter user tweeting Dan Sullivan to ask whether the visibility of companies would drop if their My Business listing was updated to ‘temporarily closed’. Mr Sullivan’s response, as shown on the right, was very clear and concise; “Temporarily closed doesn’t impact ranking or visibility”.
However, when users changed their business listing to become ‘temporarily closed’, a warning was appearing within Google to state that making the change would, in fact, result in a reduced level of visibility being suffered (see right).
Positively though, Google quickly acted to rectify this issue and, as of March 30th, its guidance regarding temporary closures of businesses affected by COVID-19 was updated to ensure that temporarily closed businesses will now be treated the same as an open business:
“If your business is affected by COVID-19, update your Google My Business profile to provide the most accurate information to your customers… Marking your business temporarily closed will not affect search ranking and it will be treated similar to open businesses.”
Now, businesses that have changed their My Business hours to ‘temporary closed’ will see the following message appearing within their listing instead, which works far more effectively for businesses worldwide:
Change your opening hours by following these simple instructions:
- Sign in to Google My Business on desktop.
- In the menu on the left, click Info.
- To the right, point to the section “Close this business on Google.”
- Expand this section and click click “Mark as temporarily closed.”
