Phil Risher explains a November 2023 Google core/local-pack ranking update that appears to take a business's listed hours into account when deciding whether to show it in local search results. He presents examples (a law firm and a psychiatrist) where listings dropped in rank when marked closed and rose when marked open. The video advises businesses to keep Google Business Profile hours accurate (including using 24/7 if an answering service handles calls after hours), to monitor and accept Google-suggested edits, and shows how to edit hours via the Google Business Profile UI.
Chapters
Google just released a new algorithm update for their local rankings. So in this video I'm going to go through how you can leverage this for your business. We were just on a client call and this conversation came up and we picked the right option, but you may not pick the right option or even know that this is an option at all. So in this video I'm going to go through and show you how to implement this for your business, but also what it means for other businesses. All right, so Google just did a core update in November 2023, so literally, you know, a couple weeks ago. And, and in that update they went through and most businesses don't look at their rankings so they don't really know these things. But a bunch of digital marketing people, they track rankings on a weekly basis, just like us for the businesses we work with. And so what they found was that there was a discrepancy between being closed and open. And what it came down to was that the ranking significantly dropped overnight. And so what they did was they switched from 24. 7 to, to, from their, their confined hours of like 8 to 5 to 24. 7. And what happened was you can see when they're open they ranked very well. When they were closed they didn't rank at all except for right in their main area. And here's this was a law firm and then you can see this is a psychiatrist office. Very same thing. So what this tells us is that with the new update, Google is taking your hours into consideration for when it's ranking you. Why is this important? Because Google is can also go in and change your hours whenever it wants. It can make recommendations to your Google business profile. And if you don't go in and accept them or check them, then you'll never know if they're open. So what does this mean for you? Let's say all your competitors are closed on Saturday, but you do have someone who answered the phone on Saturday. Well, you're going to rank better if you show on Saturday. Also let's say you have a 24. 7 answering service that answers your phones after hours. Well, you should put 24. 7 on here because someone does answer the phone 24 7. And if it's 6pm and your office closes at 5pm but it's 6pm well you're not going to show. And then no one's going to go to your website and actually call you for your after hours call service. And so taking advantage of this, coming up with the strategy on a monthly basis just to check your Google business profile. If you haven't checked it, go check it. And so in this video I'm going to show you how to do that as well. So go to your Google, you can just type in your business name here or you can go to google.com business and you can find your business profile. Or what you're going to do is go over here to edit profile and in edit profile you're going to be able to select hours and in these hours you're going to be able to check the box here and you're going to be able to manipulate them. Same thing goes with any special hours or holiday hours. You can put these in and it's going to also affect your rankings as well. So you want to make sure that this is correct. As I mentioned before, people outside patrons or Google itself can scrub your website or I don't think they're open at this time and they are open at this time. Or people can make recommendations and so your hours can change. So if you haven't checked your hours yet, go check your hours, get them up to date. I'm curious to get your thoughts. Have you tried this before? Do you think that it does affect them or not? This is the data here, but I'm curious to get your thoughts. Drop a comment below, be sure to hit like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
