Marking a business as “temporarily closed” and search rankings

Many of our Locl customers are small business owners who are unfortunately having to temporarily close their brick and mortar businesses due to Covid-19. As these businesses have begun to close, we’ve been working with owners to make sure the information is reflected on their Google My Business page. However, these updates have left some wondering – how will this affect my search ranking factor? Well, there’s been some good news out of Google this week as it relates to search rankings.

Google’s Danny Sullivan, an expert on all things Google Search related, has confirmed that marking a business as “temporarily closed” or changing hours to reflect closures will not harm the search rankings or visibility.

Per SearchEngineJournal.com, as of March 30th, a temporarily closed business on Google will now be treated the same as an open business. Google is currently working on having better messaging around the display of closures via search. 

If your business is temporarily closed and your hours haven’t yet been updated, please feel free to reach out to us here at Locl. We’d love to help.