Home/Notes/Google Business hours: a field note from a restaurant
Google Business hours: a field note from a restaurant
14 Feb 2024
How a restaurant deals with Google Business hours — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: TTL of 300 seconds. The Google Business hours data is out of sync for a restaurant.
We run a monthly diff on DNS for a restaurant. If a record changes and nobody in the team made the change, we get an alert. TTL of 300 seconds was caught this way last quarter.
We billed a restaurant two hours for Google Business hours. The previous agency billed forty hours and left TTL of 300 seconds behind. Complexity is not expertise.
For a restaurant, we wrote a three-line script that checks Google Business hours every morning and emails the owner if anything changes. Total cost: zero.
Fixing Google Business hours cost less than the lunch meeting where a restaurant decided to wait another quarter. Waiting is never free.
We quoted a restaurant half what the other firm did because we did not propose features they did not ask for. The scope was Google Business hours, not a rebrand.
Crawlers and people want the same thing from Google Business hours: one URL, a title that matches the heading, and a next link that goes somewhere real.
When a restaurant moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was TTL of 300 seconds. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
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