The app retires, and Google edits your hours

Two questions have come up on nearly every client call this month. Where am I supposed to edit this now, and why did my hours change when nobody here changed them.

Both come from the same place. Since Google renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile in November, management has been moving into Search and Maps, and Google has said the Google My Business app is being retired this year. At the same time Google has got confident enough about the hours it works out for itself to put them on your listing.

Here is how we manage profiles now, and what to do when Google edits something you did not.

Where the controls actually live

Three routes, and it is worth knowing all three, because they do not show the same things.

1. Google Search on a desktop. Sign in with the account that manages the listing and search your business name, or just search “my business”. The merchant panel opens above the results with Edit profile, Promote, Messages, Reviews, Performance and Bookings. This is where we do most of the work now.
2. The Google Maps app on a phone. Tap your profile picture, then your business profile. The same controls on a smaller screen, and the right place to post a photo on the day it was taken.
3. The Business Profile Manager on desktop, the old dashboard, for anyone with more than one location. Bulk edits, users and permissions still live there, and for a multi-location practice it is still the fastest way to change the same thing ten times.

One rule that saves hours later. Decide which Google account owns the listing, then give everyone else access as a manager from that account. The most common mess we inherit is a listing owned by a former office manager’s personal Gmail, with three people making edits from accounts that have no permission at all.

Why your hours changed on their own

Google no longer waits for you to update hours. It works them out from your website, from other listings, from edits customers suggest, and from the automated calls it places to businesses to confirm. When it is confident, it updates the profile or shows a note that hours might differ.

For a business with steady hours this is invisible. For anyone with a lunch break, seasonal hours, a half day on Friday, or an office that closes the week between Christmas and New Year, it produces wrong hours at exactly the moment somebody is deciding whether to drive over.

What works, in the profiles we manage:

• Confirm your hours even when they have not changed. Opening the hours editor and saving tells Google you are the source. Stale hours invite a guess.
• Set special hours before the holiday, not after. Explicit holiday hours carry more weight than anything Google infers. Presidents Day is next Monday, which makes this week the week.
• Use more hours for anything that is not front door hours. There are separate entries for phone hours, pickup, delivery, senior hours and similar. A restaurant whose kitchen closes an hour before the room does should say that here, not in the description.
• Match your website. If the footer says one thing and the listing says another, one of them is teaching Google to distrust the other. The same goes for your bigger directory listings.
• Turn notifications on. The Maps app and email will both tell you when an edit is applied or suggested. Nobody notices a silent change.
• Read updates from customers. Suggested edits to hours, address and attributes sit there waiting for somebody to confirm or reject them, and an unanswered one tends to stick.

If a wrong edit does stick, enter the correct hours and save them again, then check back in a few days. Repeating the correct answer is what settles it. Support is a last resort and a slow one.

The monthly pass we run on every profile

Fifteen minutes, once a month, from the merchant panel in Search.

• Hours, including special hours for anything in the next six weeks
• Categories and attributes, especially any service you have started offering since the last pass
• Photos: two or three real ones, taken on a phone, not stock
• One post, with a real offer or a real piece of news
• Every review replied to, short and human
• Messages checked, or switched off if nobody is going to answer them
• Performance: which searches brought people in, and how many of them called

That last one matters more than the rest. Calls from the listing are the cheapest leads most local businesses get, and for a lot of patients the profile is the only page they ever see. If nobody answers the phone, everything above it is decoration.

What we are not doing

We are not rushing to a new tool because the app is going away. Everything the app did is already available in Search and Maps.

We are not adding keywords to the business name. Google tightened the local results around that at the end of last year, and the listings that were stuffed are still digging out.

We are not letting a listings management tool push hours automatically unless somebody reviews what it sends. An automated sync that puts the wrong hours on twenty sites is worse than the problem it was bought to solve.

What to do this month

• Search your business name while signed in and check that the merchant panel opens. If it does not, fix ownership before anything else on this list.
• Open hours, confirm them, and add special hours for Presidents Day and any spring break closure.
• Clear out updates from customers and resolve anything sitting there unanswered.
• Put the Maps app on the phone of whoever will actually post, and turn notifications on.
• Line up the hours on your website footer, your listing and your two biggest directory profiles until they are identical.
• Read the calls number in Performance, then ask the front desk what happens to those calls.

More of the buying decision happens on the profile every year, and less of it on your website than most owners expect. Keeping it accurate is the least glamorous part of local SEO and the part that pays first, which is why profile management is the first thing we fix for a new dental client.