Changing your address and hours on Google.

What does changing your address or hours actually involve?

Two jobs, not one. The first is the edit itself, which takes a minute once you know where the button is. The second is Google's review of that edit, which you do not control and cannot hurry along.

Google's own help page is blunt about whose job the first part is. You can edit your verified Business Profile on Google to keep your business info accurate and up to date, it says, and it lists address, hours, contact info and photos among the details you can update. Nobody at Google is watching your shop and noticing that you moved.

The second part is the one that catches people out. On the same page, above the list of fields you can change, Google says that it reviews your changes before updating them live on your profile. So there is a gap between saving the new address and customers seeing it, and during that gap the old details are still the ones doing the work.

For a barber who has moved two doors along the high street, that gap is a small queue outside the wrong door. For a restaurant that has shortened its winter hours, it is a family turning up in the dark to a closed kitchen. Treat the edit as the start of the job rather than the end of it.

Who is actually allowed to make the edit?

One account, and sometimes one extra step before the fields will even open.

Google is explicit about the account. To edit your business info, you need to sign in to the Google Account that is linked to your Business Profile. That sounds obvious until you try it. The listing was set up by a manager who left, or by the web designer who built the site years ago, or on a personal Gmail nobody has the password for. There is no way to edit around that, so the access has to be recovered first.

There is a second condition, and it carries a hedge worth reading twice. Google says that to show your business on Search, Maps and other Google services you must add or claim the business and then verify the profile, and it adds that some businesses might need to verify their Business Profile first before they can make any changes with their info. Might, not will. If you open the profile and the address will not budge, unverified status is the first thing to look at.

The practical lesson is to sort access out on a quiet week rather than on the morning the removal van arrives. Find out which Google Account owns the listing, write it down where the business keeps important things, and give a second person owner access if more than one of you needs to change the hours.

How do you change the address or hours, step by step?

Google documents two routes, one in a browser and one in the Maps app. It also warns that certain features to manage your profile may differ between Search and Maps and your device's operating system, so if a field is missing where you are looking, try the other route before you decide it cannot be changed.

On Google Search

1. Go to your Business Profile, signed in to the linked Google Account.
2. Select Edit profile.
3. Change the address, the pin location or the hours.
4. Select Save.

In the Google Maps app

1. Open the Google Maps app on your mobile device.
2. At the bottom right, tap Business.
3. Tap Edit profile.
4. Make your changes, then tap Save.

Google lists address and pin location as separate things you can edit, and that distinction matters more than it sounds. A correct street address with the pin dropped on the building behind yours still sends a driver to the wrong place. After any move, look at the map and drag the pin onto the door customers actually use.

Hours are their own field, and the special hours for bank holidays and the Christmas period sit with them. Updating the ordinary week and leaving the holidays is the most common half-finished edit we see on the profiles we take over.

Why has your new address or hours not appeared yet?

Because Google has not finished looking at it. The help page states it plainly: we review your changes before we update them live on your profile. The same page points owners at a way to check the status of an edit, which is more useful than refreshing Maps and hoping.

What not to do while you wait: nothing dramatic. Saving the same change again and again does not speed up a review, and flipping the address back and forth is the kind of churn that makes a listing look unreliable. Save it once, check the status, give it time.

What to do instead is the part most people skip. If the old address is still showing, make sure whoever is at the old unit knows where to send people, put a line at the top of your website saying where you are now, and say it again on your social accounts. A sheet of A4 on the old door costs nothing and saves a booking.

If an edit does not stick, Google's guidelines for representing your business are what it was measured against, and they are linked from the same help page. Read them before you resubmit, because the second attempt gets judged the same way as the first.

What is Google already collecting about your business?

More than most owners realise. Google says that to confirm business details and keep a profile updated and discoverable, it may occasionally reach out using automated messages via call, text or WhatsApp to the verified phone number on your profile. The page hedges the reach of this: it says the feature is currently available for select regions, languages and business categories and may not be available for all users.

The line that should change how you brief your staff comes next. Any information you provide in response to these messages may be used to update your profile. So whoever picks up the phone on a Saturday afternoon is, in effect, editing the listing. If they guess at the closing time, the guess can become the published time.

You can see what has been gathered. Under Edit profile there is a Collected info screen that shows each item, where it came from and the date it was collected. You can delete an item, with one catch worth knowing: deleting collected information removes it from Google's records but does not change other details already on your Business Profile. Deleting is not correcting. You still have to go and edit the field.

We looked at the louder version of this in what happens when Google's AI phones your business. Same principle either way: the phone is now an input to your listing.

Can somebody else change your opening hours?

They can ask. Google says that if you find something wrong with a Business Profile that you do not own or manage, you can suggest an edit. That is a feature rather than a loophole. It is how a shop that closed in March stops wasting everybody's afternoon.

It also means your hours are not only yours. Somebody who drove over on a bank holiday and found the door locked can suggest that you are permanently closed. A competitor, a former employee or a well-meaning regular can all put a change in front of Google without telling you about it.

The defence is boring and it works. Look at your own listing on a phone, signed out, once a month, and check the hours, the address, the pin and the phone number the way a customer meets them rather than the way the dashboard presents them. Keep the profile complete enough that there is nothing left for a stranger to correct. In our experience the third-party edits that do real damage land on the listings nobody is watching.

What does an address change break that Google will not fix?

Google's copy of your address is one of many. The edit you have just made does not touch your website footer, your contact page, the structured data in your page head, the price list PDF with the old postcode on it, your email signature, your invoices, or the directories that copied your details down years ago.

Start with your own estate, because that is the part you control outright: the footer and contact page, the LocalBusiness schema, the embedded map, any booking system holding a venue address, and the hours published on the site. If your site says one thing and your profile says another, you have handed Google and every AI assistant a reason to trust neither.

Then go after the copies. Search your business name with the old postcode and see who is still publishing it. Fix the ones that rank for your own name first, and leave the long tail of dead directories for a rainy afternoon.

This is the same ground we covered in how ChatGPT recommends local businesses, because assistants build an answer out of whatever agrees with itself. If you would rather hand the whole job over, it is part of what we do in our local SEO work, and there are worked examples in our case studies.

What should you do this week?

Six things, none of which needs an agency.

1. Sign in to the Google Account that owns your profile and confirm you can open Edit profile. If you cannot, that is this week's only job.
2. Check the address, then look at the map pin and drag it onto the entrance customers use.
3. Add special hours for the next bank holiday and for the Christmas period, before anybody has to ring and ask.
4. Open Edit profile, then Collected info, and read what Google has gathered by call, text or WhatsApp. Correct anything wrong in the field itself, not only in the collected list.
5. Tell whoever answers the phone that an automated question from Google about your hours can change what customers see, so the answer has to be the real one.
6. View your own listing on a phone while signed out, and compare the hours and address against your website footer and contact page.

Three objections, answered

"I changed it weeks ago and nothing happened, so the whole thing is broken." More likely it is sitting in review, or it was never saved from the linked account, or it was measured against the guidelines and did not pass. Google says it reviews changes before they go live and gives you a way to check the status of an edit, so check that before you conclude anything.

"Our hours change constantly, so there is no point keeping them accurate." This is the objection that argues against us, and it has a point. A profile that needs editing every week becomes a chore, and a chore gets dropped. The honest answer is to publish hours you can actually keep, use special hours for the exceptions, and accept that roughly right and stable beats precise and abandoned.

"We are moving, so we may as well start a fresh listing." Usually not. A move is an edit to the profile you already have rather than a reason to walk away from the reviews and history attached to it. Get access sorted, change the address, move the pin, and keep what you have built.

The verdict

This is one of the few pieces of local SEO that costs nothing and needs no software. The hard parts are not technical at all: knowing which account owns the listing, remembering that Google reviews the change before customers see it, and understanding that the phone is now something that can edit your profile.

Do the access check this week, while nothing is urgent. The businesses that come unstuck by a move are never the ones who could not find the Edit profile button. They are the ones locked out of their own listing on the day it mattered.