Every year a run of Canadian businesses loses walk-in customers in December for a reason that takes four minutes to fix in October. Their profile says open, the door is locked, and the customer who drove there goes somewhere else and does not mention it.
The busy quarter is the worst possible time to be fixing your Google Business Profile, because you will be serving customers instead. So this is the pass to do now, before the traffic arrives.
1. Set your special hours before anyone searches
Special hours are the field built for this. Google's own description is that when your hours of operation change for a brief period of time, like for a special event, you can set special hours so that your regular hours don't change, and they can be used where a business temporarily adjusts its hours or stays closed for up to 6 days in a row (sourced from Google's guidance on setting special hours).
Google also recommends confirming your hours for official holidays even if they're the same as your regular hours, which is the part people skip. A profile that has explicitly confirmed it is open on a holiday reads differently to a customer than one that has said nothing.
The Canadian dates worth setting now, taken from the federal and provincial statutory holiday listings (sourced from canada-holidays.ca):
Monday 12 October 2026, Thanksgiving. A federal holiday, observed in most provinces and territories.
Wednesday 11 November 2026, Remembrance Day. A federal holiday, but observed differently by province, so check your own before deciding.
Friday 25 December 2026, Christmas Day. Observed nationwide.
Saturday 26 December 2026, Boxing Day. A federal holiday, and where it falls on a weekend it is commonly observed on Monday 28 December. Provincial observance varies.
Friday 1 January 2027, New Year's Day.
If your province or your sector differs, take the dates from your own provincial listing rather than from this list. The point is to have set them in one sitting rather than five.
2. Decide what extended hours you are actually going to keep
Late-night December hours advertised and then not staffed are worse than never advertising them. Set the hours you will genuinely be open, including the reduced ones between Christmas and New Year, and set them as special hours rather than editing your regular hours, so your normal pattern comes back on its own in January.
If you run different hours for different things, a kitchen that closes before the room does, or a pickup counter with its own window, those belong in the more hours fields rather than squeezed into a single opening time. If you are in hospitality, what restaurants should fix on Google first covers the rest of the profile in more detail than this checklist can.
3. Use offer posts, and give them real dates
A Business Profile post is free placement on a surface a customer is already looking at. There are three types: updates, offers and events. An offer requires a title, dates, and time and automatically carries a View Offer button, and posts older than six months are archived unless a date range is set (sourced from Google's guidance on creating posts).
Two practical notes. Put the real end date on a seasonal offer, otherwise it sits on your profile in February advertising something that finished. And keep the wording plain: Google's own post guidance asks you to avoid misspelled words, extra characters and text that adds no value, and posts are reviewed before they go live.
4. Plan for the review spike, because there will be one
Your busiest quarter is also your highest-volume review quarter, in both directions. Two things are worth deciding in advance rather than at 9pm on a Saturday.
Who replies, and how fast. A calm, specific reply to a negative review during your busiest week is read by everyone who comes after it. A defensive one is read the same way.
How you ask. If you plan to ask for reviews by email or text, that is a commercial electronic message under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation, which requires consent, identification information and a working unsubscribe mechanism, with express consent obtained by opt-in rather than opt-out, an unsubscribe valid for at least 60 days, and requests processed without delay and no later than 10 business days (sourced from the CRTC's CASL frequently asked questions). Get the agreement when you take the customer's details, not afterwards. This is general guidance rather than legal advice, and anything consequential is worth a word with counsel. And do not offer anything in exchange for a review, which is a separate set of rules entirely.
5. Fix the boring fields while it is quiet
The ones that cost you customers in a rush: the phone number that rings a line nobody answers in December, the parking or accessibility attributes a visitor checks before driving over, the payment methods, and whether your pin actually lands on your door rather than the middle of the block.
Also worth a look: photographs from last December, if the shop looks different now. A profile that has not been touched since spring tends to drift, and a quiet October is when that is cheap to correct.
6. Check it on a phone, from outside your own network
Everything above is entered in a dashboard and seen on a phone. Search your own business on a phone, not signed in, and look at what a stranger sees: the hours, the first three photographs, the most recent review, the post. That thirty second check catches more than the dashboard does.
The whole pass, in order
Special hours for the five dates. The extended hours you will actually keep. One offer post with a real end date. A decision about who replies to reviews. The boring fields. Then look at it on a phone.
That is an hour in October that buys back a quarter's worth of walk-ins. If you would rather keep doing it yourself, the fifteen minute monthly routine is the year-round version of the same habit.
And if keeping the profile current every month is the thing that never quite happens once trading picks up, what an ongoing plan covers is published rather than quoted on a call.
What is the one field on your profile you already suspect is out of date?