Google My Business Now Requires Seasonal Business to be Marked as “Temporarily Closed” During Their Off-Season

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Do you run a seasonal business? Perhaps you own a lawn service company or a snow removal company. If so, you’ll have to pay attention to a new rule by Google My Business. The platform is now requiring all seasonal businesses to be labeled as “Temporarily Closed” during the off-season. So if you own the snow removal company, for example, it will be marked as “Temporarily Closed” for most of the year. Let’s check out more of the details from the Google My Business Help page.

Closed: We’ll Be Back Next Season!

Here’s what Google says about seasonal businesses:

  • “During the season in which your business is open, set your regular hours of operation. You may set special hours for holidays, temporary closures, or other events.
  • You can also indicate that your business is open only for a specific seasonal period in your business description.
  • During off-season, contact support to have your business marked as temporarily closed. Alternatively, you can mark your business as permanently closed during this period.
  • Set your regular business hours when your business reopens.”

There you have it! Check out the third bullet point. There’s only one problem: Businesses have to “contact support” to have the business marked as temporarily closed. There’s no easier way to do this. How many seasonal business owners are actually going to do this? How many even know about this new rule?

The problem isn’t that it can’t be done; however, we believe that there should be an easier way to go about this. For example, businesses should be able to switch it to “open” or “closed’ right from the Google My Business dashboard. Or, another easy way would be to have a clickable button somewhere that will allow seasonal businesses to show whether they’re open for the season, or not.

We wouldn’t be surprised if Google eventually did make it easier for seasonal businesses. After all, they do change their policies, methods, and procedures quite often. Either way, here’s to hoping that contacting Google support and making the request is an easy process.

Featured photo by Pixabay License on Pixabay