Hours for Service Area Business- with clients that mainly search after hours?

[Jessica C]

Hello! I am a newborn photographer and most of my potential clients are searching for newborn photography 10pm-5am- while they are up with their newborn throughout the night. My hours are 10-4pm on GBP, but I know this is NOT when my clients are surfing Google Map looking for newborn photography. I am temped to change to 24/7, but those are not realistic hours for me. Any advice?

 

[keyserholiday]

Set your hours to 24/7. If they call, they will leave a message.

 

[JS Girard]

Basically what Keyser said. As long as you have a way to handle out-of-hours calls (we've had clients complain about it because the number was literally their personal cell phone...), Google basically doesn't enforce anything related to hours.

 

[Jessica C]

Basically what Keyser said. As long as you have a way to handle out-of-hours calls (we've had clients complain about it because the number was literally their personal cell phone...), Google basically doesn't enforce anything related to hours.

ok thank you. I was worried my GBP would get suspended if I set to 24/7. like it would send a red flag?

 

[Jessica C]

Set your hours to 24/7. If they call, they will leave a message.

thank you! and I don't have to worry that changing my hours to 24/7 would suspend my account? Since the service is photography, I guess I didn't think Google would think 24/7 was realistic (vs a plumber who makes sense to be 24/7).

 

[JS Girard]

ok thank you. I was worried my GBP would get suspended if I set to 24/7. like it would send a red flag?

Aside from the general "GBPs randomly getting suspended for pretty much any edit" issues that come and go in the US (I work in Quebec, where we don't have that problem), I've not heard of such cases.

You can almost certainly expect Google to sometimes put back the "correct" hours via Google automated/unilateral "suggestions", especially if they are displayed consistently on the website and external directories, but that's unrelated to suspension risk as far as I'm aware.

 

[keyserholiday]

thank you! and I don't have to worry that changing my hours to 24/7 would suspend my account? Since the service is photography, I guess I didn't think Google would think 24/7 was realistic (vs a plumber who makes sense to be 24/7).

Google doesn't suspend for updating the hours.

 

[Tony Wang]

A more realistic scenario for some businesses setting their hours to 24/7 would be someone leaving a negative review because they weren't actually open. But that is extremely unlikely for your industry, no one would call a photographer at 11pm and expect an answer.

But it's also unlikely that you're rankings are affected by hours unless all your competitors show 24/7. I just did an after hours search for "newborn photographers near me" and only one or two in the top 20 had 24/7 hours.