--- title: "Temporary Closure: Updating Your Google Listing and Ads During COVID-19" description: "Since Quebec declared a public health emergency on March 13, several of my restaurant and retail clients in the Greater Montreal area have either closed their doors to the public or cut their hours because of COVID-19. Their Google My Business listing hasn't caught up: it still shows a normal week's hours and no mention ... Read more" canonical: "https://socialinfluencebuilder.com/en/blog/temporary-closure-google-listing-covid19/" lastmod: "2020-03-20T19:49:00+00:00" lang: "en-CA" format: "markdown" --- HTML version: # Temporary Closure: Updating Your Google Listing and Ads During COVID-19 Since Quebec declared a public health emergency on March 13, several of my restaurant and retail clients in the Greater Montreal area have either closed their doors to the public or cut their hours because of COVID-19. Their Google My Business listing hasn't caught up: it still shows a normal week's hours and no mention of takeout or delivery, which sends a customer toward a locked door or a phone number nobody is answering right when that customer actually needs an answer. Here is the sequence I'm running with these clients this week so their Google listing and their ad campaigns match what's actually happening, instead of leaving the customer to find out the hard way. ## Why update the listing this week instead of waiting? Because an outdated listing costs a call or a visit at the exact moment every one of those matters more than usual. On March 13, Quebec declared a public health emergency and closed schools, CEGEPs and daycares. On March 15, it ordered concert halls, cinemas, bars and gyms to close, and capped restaurants at half their usual capacity, with every other table left empty. People still looking for somewhere open are searching from their phone, often adding words like "open," "delivery" or "takeout" to their usual search. A listing that still shows regular hours and says nothing about delivery misses those searches, even when the business is genuinely still serving customers in a different way. ## Should you mark the business as temporarily closed? Only if it isn't offering any service at all, not even at a distance. The "Temporarily closed" setting tells Google the business isn't operating right now, which is accurate for a concert venue or a salon that cannot function without seeing someone in person. It's the wrong setting for a restaurant that has kept its delivery or takeout service running: that business is still operating, just differently, and marking it closed would hide a service that still exists. The question worth asking before checking that box is simple: if a customer calls right now, does someone answer and serve them in some way? If the answer is yes, the listing stays open and it's the hours and the description that change. ## Which listing attributes should you turn on first? Service attributes like "offers delivery" or "offers takeout" already existed on restaurant listings before this week, and that's exactly what makes them useful right now: they aren't new, they're just often left off because nobody has touched them since the listing was set up. I open the attributes section before I even touch the description, because those checkboxes feed directly into the filters people are using right now in Google Search and Maps, like "restaurants with delivery" near them. A restaurant that genuinely offers delivery but whose listing doesn't confirm it simply doesn't show up under those filters, even though the service exists. I also check that any ordering link on the listing still points to a working page with the right hours on it, not a menu built around dine-in service. ## How should you handle reviews and questions while closed? By answering faster than usual, because that's often the only direct contact left between the business and a customer who's on the fence. The listing's questions-and-answers section keeps getting messages even when nobody's on site to check it, so I'm recommending clients look at it daily this week instead of the weekly check they were doing before. A recent review that mentions a closure or a cancelled service deserves a short reply confirming what's still available, with a link to the current listing information: that keeps a visitor from trusting a comment from a few days ago that no longer matches reality. I never delete a negative review tied to the current situation, even when it's hard to read; a calm, factual reply does more for trust than silence does. ## How do you adjust hours without losing the listing's normal setup? By editing the regular hours field directly rather than using special hours, which is meant for one-off exceptions like a statutory holiday. A closure or service change that runs for weeks isn't a single-day exception, so I change the actual opening-hours field to match what's really happening, whether that's a shortened delivery window or full closure on certain days. The part most owners miss: write down the regular hours somewhere, in a file or a calendar note, before replacing them. Those hours have to go back once things return to normal, and nobody remembers the exact schedule after several weeks of changes. ## What should change in the description and the posts? The description needs to say what the business offers this week, not what it offered last month. I rewrite the opening line to name the active service mode (delivery, takeout, phone appointments) before anything else in the text, because that's often the only part a customer reads before deciding whether to call. I follow that with a post on the client's [Google My Business listing](/en/glossary/#google-business-profile) announcing the change directly, with the current phone number and a plain sentence about what's different. A post gets noticed faster than a quiet change to the hours field, and it stays visible even to customers who had already looked at the listing before the change went up. ## Should you pause Google Ads campaigns or rewrite them? That depends on whether the business is still serving customers in some form. For a client closing completely with no replacement service, I pause the campaigns instead of letting them run toward a locked door: that stops spending on calls nobody will answer, and pausing doesn't erase the campaign's history, it picks back up exactly where it left off. For a client keeping delivery or takeout running, I'd rather rewrite the ads than shut everything off: the headline and description now lead with delivery, the landing page points to current information, and I cut the daily budget instead of dropping it to zero, so there's still some visibility without spending at the normal rate. Pausing a campaign entirely only makes sense once there's genuinely nothing left to sell behind the ad. ## What order should these changes happen in? Here's the order I'm following with every client this week, so nothing gets missed while things keep changing fast: 1. Decide honestly whether the business is still offering any service, even a reduced one, or closing completely. 2. Turn on the relevant service attributes (delivery, takeout, remote appointments) so the listing matches how people are filtering search results right now. 3. Update the regular hours to match the current service, noting the usual hours somewhere before replacing them. 4. Rewrite the opening line of the description to lead with the active service mode. 5. Post an update on the listing with the current phone number and what has changed. 6. Check recent reviews and questions and reply to anything about the closure or the hours. 7. Pause Google Ads campaigns for a fully closed business, or rewrite the ads and cut the budget for one that's keeping some service running. 8. Check the listing from a phone the way a customer would, to confirm the hours, description and number match what's really happening this week. It's the same sequence I run for any [Google My Business listing management](/en/services/google-business-profile/) mandate: a listing that's kept current, even through a closure everyone hopes is short, keeps a customer from hitting a locked door and keeps your business from missing a call it could have taken another way. *Drafted with AI assistance, checked and published by [Marven Salgado](/en/about/marven-salgado/).* ## Go further - **Service:** [Google Business Profile Optimization for Montreal Businesses](https://socialinfluencebuilder.com/en/services/google-business-profile/) - **Case study:** [La Toxica](https://socialinfluencebuilder.com/en/la-toxica/) - **Glossary:** [Digital marketing glossary: Google Business Profile](https://socialinfluencebuilder.com/en/glossary/#google-business-profile)