Bad Habit #6 is the quietest one on the list. Nobody argues about it. Nobody defends it. Most owners have not looked at it once since the day they set the listing up. It is that little hours box on your Google profile, and right now it is turning work away while you are sitting there with your phone in your hand.
Here is what nobody tells you. Those hours are not a description. They are a switch. When somebody in Burleson types "tire shop open now" at 6:40 on a Tuesday, Google does not show them every tire shop and let them sort it out. It filters. If your box says you closed at 5, you are not further down the list. You are not on the list.
What we actually see when we scan
We have scanned 9,032 businesses across 96 towns in Texas and Illinois, from Cleburne and Fort Worth out to Cicero, Berwyn and the south side of Chicago. 7,740 of them have hours posted. Here is how those hours break down.
- 2,265 close by 5:00 PM. One third of everybody with real posted hours.
- 4,317 close by 6:00 PM. Dark before most people finish dinner.
- Only 1,152 stay open past 8:00 PM. Under 17 percent of the whole field.
- 5,002 show Sunday: Closed.
- 1,463 are closed the entire weekend, Saturday and Sunday both.
- 1,292 have no hours posted at all, which Google treats as a shrug.
The part that stings
Ask any owner in Cleburne when the phone actually rings and you get the same answer every time. Early morning and after supper. People call about their roof, their truck, their AC and their fence when they are done working, not while they are at work. That is 6 to 9 at night, and it is Saturday morning.
Now go look at what your listing claims you are doing during those exact hours. For most of the businesses we scan, it says closed. You are not closed. You answer your cell at 8 o'clock every night of your life. But Google was told otherwise, and Google believes the box, so it quietly hands that search to the shop down the road who bothered to update theirs.
This is the difference between being closed and looking closed, and only one of those two costs you money.
Where it gets worse
The weekend number is the one that should bother you. 1,463 businesses we scanned are shut on Google both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday is when people have time to deal with the thing that has been bugging them for three weeks. If a guy in Berwyn spends his Saturday morning calling four contractors, and you are not in the "open now" results, you never existed in that decision. You did not lose the bid. You never got looked at.
The no-hours crowd has a version of the same problem. 1,292 profiles have nothing in the box. Google does not assume you are open. It just stops putting you in the searches that filter for it, and a customer looking at your listing sees a blank where everybody else has a green "Open".
The fix, and it takes about four minutes
- Open your Google Business Profile, hit Edit profile, then Hours. That is the whole tour.
- Post the hours you will actually answer the phone, not the hours the shop door is unlocked. Those are two different numbers for most trades, and Google only cares about the first one.
- Put something on Saturday. Even 8 to noon. Half a Saturday beats the word Closed.
- If you take emergency calls, say so. Google has a separate More Hours setting for exactly that, and almost nobody in your town uses it.
- Set special hours before the holidays, not after. Thanksgiving and Christmas week are where stale hours generate the angriest reviews.
- Do not lie about it. If you post 8am to 10pm and let it ring, you will collect one star reviews that say "nobody answered." Post what is true, then honor it.
Why we keep bringing this stuff up
Because this is the job. We scan these towns, we track what the listings say, we are on the phone with owners all week, and the same five or six quiet problems keep showing up on businesses that do great work. Nobody is failing at roofing. They are failing at being findable at 7pm on a Thursday. The hours box is a four minute fix and most people reading this will not do it, which is honestly why the ones who do pull ahead so fast.
Go pull up your own listing on your phone right now and read the hours out loud. If they are wrong, fix them tonight. If you would rather have somebody handle the whole picture, the site, the profile, the hours, the photos, the reviews, that is what we do at badhabit.design. Either way, get the box right.