Being open now is a top 5 local ranking factor

Two things changed in how Google picks which local businesses to show, and almost nobody running a trade business has heard about either.

Whether you are open at the moment someone searches is now among the top five local ranking factors. Not open generally. Open right then, at 8pm on a Tuesday when someone’s boiler has packed in.

And review recency now outweighs review count. A business earning a few new reviews a week consistently outranks one sitting on a bigger pile of old ones.

Both of those are free to act on. Neither requires a new website. That is why this is worth ten minutes of your time today.

Why opening hours suddenly matter this much

Think about when people actually search for a trade. It is rarely 11am on a quiet Wednesday. It is evenings, weekends, and the moment something breaks.

Google worked out that showing a business that is shut is a bad answer, so it started weighting live opening hours heavily. If your profile says you close at 5pm, you are being filtered out of the searches that happen at 7pm, no matter how good your reviews are.

Two practical consequences:

Put your real hours in, including evenings and weekends if you genuinely answer then. A lot of tradespeople take calls until 8 or 9 but have 9 to 5 on their profile because that is what they typed in three years ago.

If you do emergency callouts, say so properly. Google Business Profile lets you set separate hours for different services. An emergency plumber showing as closed at 10pm is invisible for the exact search that pays best.

The honest caveat: do not claim 24/7 if you will not answer at 3am. A missed call from someone Google sent you is worse than not appearing, because it teaches Google that sending you traffic does not work out.

Review recency, not review count

This one reframes a job most people think of as finished.

If you collected thirty reviews two years ago and stopped, you are losing to the firm with twelve that keeps adding one or two a week. Google reads a steady trickle as evidence the business is alive and still doing good work. A frozen pile reads as a business that might not be trading any more.

Three rules, and they take no effort once you start:

Ask the same day the job finishes, while the goodwill is highest. A week later it is a chore.

Send the direct link. Get it from your Google Business Profile under “Ask for reviews”. Telling someone to “leave us a Google review” puts the work on them.

Make it one tap and give an easy out. Here is the message, take it word for word:

“Hi [name], glad we got that sorted for you today. If you have got 30 seconds, a quick Google review would genuinely help a small business like ours. Here is the direct link: [link]. No worries at all if not.”

And reply to every review, including the poor ones. People read the replies more carefully than the reviews, and a calm reply to a bad review builds more trust than five stars ever will.

What the AI layer actually reads

The local results increasingly get assembled by AI rather than a straight ranked list, and it is pulling from a narrow set of things:

• Your Business Profile fields, in full. Categories, services, service area, hours, description.
• The text inside your reviews, not just the star rating.
• Your photos.
• The website connected to the profile.

An incomplete or stale profile now risks being left out entirely, regardless of how long you have been trading or how good you are. That is the uncomfortable part: offline reputation does not carry across if the profile is half filled in.

It also means the AI layer surfaces fewer businesses than the old ten-blue-links did, with more specificity. Being roughly relevant is no longer enough to make the list.

The hour that is worth more than a redesign

If you do nothing else this week, do these, in this order. All free.

1. Fix your opening hours so they match what you actually do, evenings included.
2. Pick the most specific primary category available. Emergency plumber beats plumber.
3. Fill in your services and service area properly, in text.
4. Add ten photos of real jobs. Not stock images.
5. Ask your last five customers for a review, same-day style, with the direct link.
6. Check your name, address and phone are identical everywhere they appear online. Mismatches make Google less confident about showing you.

Where a website still comes in

We build websites, so weigh this accordingly.

Everything above is free and none of it needs us. What a site does is the next step: the profile gets you shown, and the site is what people check before they ring. If it loads slowly, hides the phone number, or does not say what you charge, the profile work still gets wasted at the last hurdle.

The order matters though. Profile first, reviews second, site third. Anyone selling you the third while your profile is half empty has the order wrong.

When you are ready for the site part, we build small business websites from £32 a month with hosting, updates and support included, and you own your domain and content. See what is included or work out what yours should cost.