Hours, contact buttons and attributes

It’s a bank holiday Monday. A family looks you up on Google, sees your café is open until four, and drives across town. They arrive at a locked door.

They probably won’t come back. The fix takes a couple of minutes, once per holiday.

In this lesson, we’ll get three things right on your Google Business Profile: your hours, including holidays; the buttons customers tap to reach you; and the small facts Google calls attributes.

Let’s start with hours. Google’s own tips for local ranking say to keep your hours up to date, “including special store hours”.

Your regular hours are the hours customers can come in, or reach you. Google calls them customer-facing hours.

Special hours are for single days that are different: a public holiday, an event, a training day. They replace your normal hours for that date only. Google even suggests confirming your hours for official holidays when they’re the same as usual, so customers know they’re right.

Closed for longer? Google’s help pages draw the line like this. Closed for six days or fewer, say over Christmas: use special hours. Closed for seven days or more, for a refit or for the off-season: mark the business “temporarily closed”. Google says temporarily closed businesses can rank after open ones for broad searches, so switch it back the day you reopen.

Does it matter? In Whitespark’s 2026 survey of 47 local search experts, being open at the time of the search ranked fifth of 187 map factors. That’s expert opinion, not Google’s, but wrong hours lose customers either way.

Next, the buttons. They’re where a search turns into a customer.

The call button rings the phone number on your profile, so make sure someone answers it. We’ll come back to that in Module 5.

The website button should open a page that represents this location. For most small businesses, that’s the home page. If you have more than one location, link each profile to that location’s own page.

If your category allows it, you can add a booking or ordering link, and mark your own link as the preferred one.

And in some regions, customers can message you by text or WhatsApp, straight from your profile. If you add both, Google only shows the text option. Only switch messaging on if someone will reply quickly. A message nobody answers can cost you the job.

Last, attributes. These are the small facts on your profile: a wheelchair-accessible entrance, Wi-Fi, the payments you take, or identity attributes like women-owned or veteran-owned. Google’s ranking tips mention details like parking or Wi-Fi.

You set some attributes yourself. Others Google fills in from what visiting customers tell it. And some depend on your category and your country.

The rule is simple: tick only what’s true today, and look again every three months, because things change.

Let’s do it together. On a computer, search for your business name while you’re signed in, then choose “Edit profile”, and “Hours”.

Next to “Special hours”, select edit. Google shows some upcoming holidays. Pick one, or choose “Add a date”. Tick “Closed”, or type your hours, and save. Only save hours that are true.

Now “Contact”. Here’s your phone number, your website, and, if Google offers it where you are, “Chat”, for text or WhatsApp.

Then “More”, for attributes. Go through each group and answer yes or no.

One last thing, for the website button. Open Flexi Local’s free UTM builder. Paste your web address, choose “Website button”, and copy the link. It adds a small tag that tells your analytics a visit came from your profile. The page it opens stays the same. Click the link once to check it, then paste it into the website field on your profile.

A quick rules check. Google’s guidelines ask for your regular, customer-facing hours: when customers can call or walk in. Some businesses shouldn’t list hours at all, including those that operate only by appointment. If that’s you, choose “Open with no main hours”. And don’t use special hours to cover a long closure. That’s what “temporarily closed” is for.

Holidays differ by country, and even within one. In the US, there’s Thanksgiving. In the UK, bank holidays aren’t the same in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In Australia, each state and territory sets its own public holidays. So set the ones that apply where you are.

And a tip for restaurants and cafés: use your dine-in hours as your main hours, and add delivery or takeaway times under “More hours”.

To recap. One: regular hours, special hours for every holiday, and “temporarily closed” for seven days or more. Two: every button rings, opens or replies. Three: attributes, only the true ones.

Your task. Add special hours for your next three holidays, and write them on page W3 of the workbook, your business facts sheet, with your attributes and links. Then pick up your phone, find your profile, and tap every button: call, website, booking and chat. Fix anything that doesn’t work. And tag your website link with the UTM builder.

Want a sign for the window too? Our free holiday hours tool makes one, plus a matching post.

Next, in Lesson 2.5: photos, and a description that follows the rules.