Google Suspends Features for Business Pages During COVID-19 Crisis

Local businesses face difficult challenges during the COVID-19 crisis. Earlier this week Ontario announced that all non-essential businesses will be required to close for at least 14 days. In responding to these requests, businesses will have to scramble to communicate with their customers as well as to find ways to conduct more of their business online (ecommerce sales are still allowed, even for businesses shutting down physical locations).

Online Tools Impacted by Coronavirus

Last week Google announced that it was temporarily limiting or disabling some of the features in Google My Business pages. This move was taken to "protect the health of our team members and reduce the need for people to come into our offices."

What this means for business owners is that there will be delays in updates to Google My Business listings including:

• open and closed states,
• special hours,
• temporary closures,
• business descriptions,
• and business attributes edits.

New listings and claimed listing verifications will also be subject to delays.

Customer Reviews Suspended

Most critically for businesses will be the suspension of Google My Business customer reviews and the ability to respond to reviews during this time.

The ability to create posts on your Google My Business page appears to be unaffected at this time. We should point out that, while not as high profile as Facebook business page posts, businesses who do post on Google My Business do see increased engagement from customers searching online. So, if you haven't been posting to your page, now might be the time to start, both for engagement and to keep as many lines of communication open as possible.

We've Got Your Back

We're available to answer any questions you may have about online marketing for your business during this critical time. Need help with your Google My Business listing and page posting? Please get in touch.

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