Hurricane Closures and Your Google Business Profile: A Coastal Checklist

When a storm is coming, set special hours on your Google Business Profile for the specific days you'll close or run short, and switch the profile to temporarily closed only when you can't yet say when you'll reopen. Leave your business name, categories, address and phone number alone. Everything else on this checklist is about doing those two things quickly, from anywhere, and undoing them cleanly afterward.

Atlantic hurricane season runs June 1 to November 30. If your business is in Horry, Charleston or Beaufort County, the setup below takes about an hour on a quiet day in May and spares you a lot of fumbling with a half-charged phone in September.

Before the season: the May checklist

If the only person who can log in to your profile has evacuated, or the sign-in code goes to a desk phone in a building with no power, nothing else on this page matters. So the first pass is about access. Run through it once a year, before June:

• At least two people can edit the profile. Add a second owner or a manager, so someone besides you can post an update while you're on I-26 headed for Columbia.
• The Google account that owns the profile has a current recovery email and phone number, and two-step verification works without anything that lives in your office.
• You have a written list of every listing you control: Google, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp and any trade directory, with a note on where each login is stored.
• Three short updates are drafted and saved: closing, limited service, reopened. Written on a calm day, they'll be accurate and polite when you're busy hauling in patio furniture.
• A one-line website banner is drafted, with a blank for the date.
• You've decided who makes the call to close, and what triggers it: a county evacuation order, a wind forecast for your area, or the power going out at the building. Base the decision on official sources such as the National Hurricane Center and your county's emergency announcements, not on social media chatter.

Keeping these details straight is one small piece of local SEO for South Carolina businesses: making sure the facts Google shows about you are accurate enough that searchers can rely on them, in a storm week and every other week.

When a storm is named: pick one of three settings

Once a storm is forecast for your stretch of coast, decide which of these describes the next few days, and set it once.

1. Open on normal hours. Change nothing on the profile. If customers might assume you've closed, post a short update saying you're open and how long you expect to stay open.
2. Open on a shortened schedule, or closed on known days. Use special hours. You set them date by date and they apply only to those dates, so your regular hours come back on their own afterward.
3. Closed with no reopening date. Mark the profile temporarily closed. Google then labels the business as temporarily closed until you switch it back.

Never use "permanently closed" for a storm closure. It's a different setting with a different meaning, and it tells everyone who searches that you're gone for good.

Say you run a seafood restaurant on Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant, and a storm is forecast to arrive Friday night. You'll serve lunch Thursday, close at 3 p.m. to secure the deck, and stay closed Friday and Saturday. That's special hours: Thursday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Friday closed, Saturday closed. If by Saturday evening you still can't say when you'll reopen, switch the profile to temporarily closed and post an update.

Now a different case. Say you run a roofing company in Conway. The office closes for two days, but the phones stay on and crews will be out tarping roofs as soon as the wind drops. Your profile stays open. Set special hours for the office if walk-in customers matter, and post an update that says how to reach you for emergency tarps. Don't rename the profile "Conway Storm Roof Repair," and don't switch your primary category to chase storm searches. If you already serve Surfside Beach, Murrells Inlet or Myrtle Beach, make sure those towns are in your service areas (a profile can list up to 20). Leave off towns your crews can't actually reach in a reasonable time.

While you're closed

• Post when something changes, not every day. One update when you close, one when you know your reopening date, one when you open.
• Keep the phone number on your listings as it is. If the office line goes down, set up call forwarding with your carrier instead of editing the number on Google and every directory, then changing it all back a week later.
• Put the banner on your website. Something like: "Closed through [date] because of the storm. Reopening news will be posted here and on our Google profile." Make it a slim strip across the top of every page, not a pop-up that covers your phone number on a small screen.
• If a customer leaves a review asking if you're open, reply when you can, with the same facts that are on the profile.

Reopening day

• Switch off temporarily closed, then check that your regular hours are still right. If you're reopening on short hours for a week, set special hours for those dates.
• Post a reopened update with a photo taken that day: the open door, the cleaned-up dining room, the trucks loaded and ready. A fresh photo shows people you're back better than a sentence does.
• Search for your business on a phone that isn't signed in to your Google account, in both Google Search and Google Maps. Confirm it shows as open, with the right hours.
• Look for edits you didn't make. Anyone can suggest changes to a business on Google Maps, and after a storm people suggest closures and new hours. Google may accept some of them, so read through the profile and correct anything that's wrong.
• Match the change everywhere else: Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Facebook and any directory where you posted a closure.
• Change the website banner to "Open again as of [date]" for a week, then take it down. An old storm banner left up into November makes the whole site look abandoned.

What to leave alone

These are the edits that can cause more trouble than the storm itself:

• Your business name. No "OPEN," no "Storm Repairs," no extra town names. Keyword stuffing a Business Profile name breaks Google's guidelines and can get a profile suspended, and a suspension in the weeks after a storm lands right when you need calls most.
• Your primary category. It describes what the business is. A temporary switch to catch storm searches can backfire, and edits to core details may send the profile back through Google's review before the change shows.
• Your address and map pin. If the building is damaged and you're working from a truck or a spare room for a few weeks, use hours, updates and the temporarily closed setting to explain what's going on. Moving the address for a short stretch can lead to verification requests you don't want to deal with during cleanup. A real, permanent move is a separate job: read Google's current guidance on moves before you edit anything.
• The profile itself. Never delete it, and never start a new profile because a storm closed you for a while. The reviews and history on the old one are worth more than a fresh start.

One last pass before you close the laptop

When the season ends on November 30, spend ten minutes on a short review. Did the right people have access? Did the drafted updates fit what actually happened? Was there a listing you forgot about until a customer mentioned it? Write the answers next to the May checklist so next year's version is better than this one.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on all of this before next June, ask for a free SEO evaluation. We'll look at your profile settings, listings and site together, so the May list is mostly done before the season opens.