Google My Business Brings the Holiday Cheer with Special Office Hours Pre-Sets
November 4th, 2015 by
Yesterday, a new My Business feature was published by Google in the product forums. This new feature allows business owners to pre-set special hours to their My Business listing for holiday closings or special times that are exceptions to your day-to-day office hours.
There is more information in Google Support documentation. If you have many locations to update, there is a spreadsheet upload feature. If your business has hours that extend into a second day, there is information on how to manage that scenario.
Editing Your My Business Special Hours
This morning, I updated the office hours of a local credit union. This feature will be especially helpful in publicizing the dates their office is closed in the upcoming weeks. It will also be especially helpful to the community for finding the times each branch is closed, and we know Google is focused on user experience.
Once you log into your Google account, navigate to your list of locations and choose one location to edit the location details. Scroll down to “Special Hours” below the standard “Hours.”
Click on “Special Hours,” and you can choose a day from a drop-down calendar and either apply early closing hours or mark if the office is closed the entire day.
If the hours will be the same at all of your locations, Google has thoughtfully provided a button to apply the hours to all locations within your account.
Your final Special Hours or office closing times may look something like this for your summary review. Some days they are closed, and some days the branch is closing early:
Great New Feature
You may want to set up some reminders to update your holiday hours every quarter or every six months.
I know businesses have wanted this feature for quite some time, and now it’s available just in time for Thanksgiving and the December holidays. Very good timing, Google!
