Covid-19 has led to many businesses needing to alter their opening hours, or closing temporarily. This is obviously a fast moving area, but for the time being the situation in the U.S. and U.K. doesn’t require storage sites to close or alter their hours.
However, many storage companies are choosing to change their reception hours, opening hours, or temporarily close. Even if you haven’t made any changes to your opening hours you might like to let your customers know that you’re running as normal.
That’s where Google My Business (GMB) comes in. GMB has multiple ways you can let your customers know about any changes to your regular service, or to let them know that you’re open as usual.
GMB Business Info
This is the section where you can update your GMB business information.
Here you can change your phone number if you need to, but the main reason we can see storage companies needing to change their info here is for opening hour changes.
Opening Hours
When making opening hour changes, remember these are your customer facing hours, not the hours customers can visit your site. So, it doesn’t matter if customers still have access to their belongings 24/7, these need to be your reception hours.
Google’s standard advice on opening hours for storage facilities applies:
- Storage facilities: Use office hours. Otherwise, use front gate hours.
If you’re closed for the coronavirus, you should mark the business as temporarily closed rather than making any changes to your hours. We’ll go into that more later.
Another thing to note is that you don’t want to change your regular hours. You should add special hours. These are found in the info section, underneath your normal hours
If you have a lot of locations this will be easier to do on using a spreadsheet. To find out more about this you can read Google’s advice on setting special hours.
Temporarily closed
As we mentioned earlier, if you’re temporarily closed due to COVID-19, there is a new option in Google to mark your business as temporarily closed. When this was first introduced there were some worries about how this would affect your rankings, but these now seem to have been allayed. It is now quick and easy to close and reopen using this option.
Description
It’s also beneficial to edit your business description to highlight any precautions you might be taking, or provide more information customers might need to know before visiting your storage facility.
Covid posts
Another way to provide this sort of information to your customers is through new COVID-19 posts.
These are found at the top of the posts section of GMB, when clicked you should see a dialog box allowing you to create your post.
These posts appear in the Google local business info panel when someone searches for your business. The things it might be beneficial to mention here are:
- Hours of operation and temporary closures.
- Changes to how the business operates.
- Updates to how the location is being managed as it relates to safety and hygiene.
- Requests for support.
Updating your business in this way should give customers peace of mind that the information on Google is correct at the time of their reading.
So there’s a quick rundown of how storage companies can adjust their Google My Business listings to improve customer experience. As always, if you have any questions, or need any help implementing any of these changes, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Stay safe.
