Hurricane Season Checklist for Gulf Coast Business Listings and Websites

Do the listing work before June 1, when the Atlantic hurricane season starts; it runs through November 30. For a business anywhere from Brownsville to Beaumont, that means deciding who updates your Google Business Profile, writing your website banner in advance, knowing where special hours and "temporarily closed" are in the profile, and agreeing that nobody marks the business "permanently closed". After a storm, update your services honestly, without storm-chaser pages or temporary listings at new addresses.

For forecasts and storm tracks, go to the National Hurricane Center. This checklist covers the part the forecast doesn't: what your customers see when they look you up.

Before the season (May is ideal)

• Name two people who can update the profile, a primary and a backup. Each should have their own manager access to the Business Profile, not a shared password. If the owner is the only one with access and evacuates inland with a dead phone, nothing gets updated.
• Have both people log in now and find the hours section, the special hours option and the place to post an update. Finding them for the first time during a storm watch is how mistakes happen.
• Write your website banner in three versions: closed, open with reduced hours, and reopened. Each includes a line for the date and time of the last update. Store them where the backup person can find them.
• Make sure someone other than your web developer can switch the banner on. Test it once, then switch it off.
• Set up a storm status page on your site (something like /storm-update) that the banner links to. One page you update is easier than editing ten.
• Decide how calls get answered if the office loses power or phone service. The number on your profile and website should forward to a cell phone that someone is actually carrying.
• List everywhere your hours appear: Business Profile, website, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp and any industry directory. You'll update them in that order of importance when it counts.
• Check that your regular hours, phone and address are right on all of them now, so that during a storm you're only changing one thing.

When a storm is on the way

• Use special hours for the specific days you'll close early or open late. Special hours apply to the dates you pick, and your regular hours come back on their own afterward.
• If you'll be closed for days, mark the profile temporarily closed. Set a reminder to remove it the day you reopen.
• Don't mark the business permanently closed, even if you don't know when you'll reopen. "Permanently closed" tells customers and Google the business no longer exists. Coming back from it is slower and messier than coming back from a temporary closure, and some customers who saw it won't look again.
• Post an update on the profile: what's closed, when you expect to reopen, and the best way to reach you.
• Switch on the banner and update the status page.
• Pause anything scheduled: promotional emails, social posts, and automated review-request texts. A "How did we do?" text landing during an evacuation reads badly.
• Answer messages wherever they come in: texts, your contact form, email, Facebook and review replies. Set an auto-reply that says plainly what you can and can't do right now, and have one named person watching the inboxes.

During and right after the storm

• Update the status page with a fresh time stamp even when the news is "still closed". A page dated three days ago looks abandoned.
• The day you reopen, remove the temporary closure. If you're open on reduced hours for a while, use special hours for those dates.
• Leave the rest of the site alone. You don't need to rewrite titles or service pages; the banner and status page carry the message. Don't take the site offline.
• Bring back regular hours on every listing in the order you wrote down in May.

After the storm, for repair and cleanup trades

Roofers, tree services, water and fire restoration, fencing, glass and general contractors get busy fast. This is where honest listings and pages pay off, and where shortcuts get businesses in trouble.

• Update the services list and profile description to match what you're actually doing: tarping, tree removal, water extraction, board-up, if you offer them.
• Keep one clear page per storm-related service, covering your real service area, with honest response times. "We're booking inspections about two weeks out" earns more trust than "24/7 emergency response" you can't deliver.
• Don't publish a page for every coastal town with the storm's name in the title. Thin pages copied across towns don't help in search, and they make a local business look like the out-of-town crews people are wary of.
• Don't set up new Business Profiles at a motel, a rented lot or a job-site trailer in the hit area. Virtual offices and mailboxes aren't eligible for a Business Profile, and short-term addresses set up to catch storm searches are the kind of thing that gets profiles suspended.
• If you're a service-area business and you're genuinely taking jobs in a nearby area for a while, add it to your service areas (you can list up to 20), and take it off when the work winds down.
• Restart review requests once customers are back on their feet, and send them to every customer. People hiring after a storm read reviews closely, and recent ones from neighbors carry weight.

When the season ends

Take the banner down, update the status page to say you're on normal hours, and keep the page for next year. Write down what went wrong while you remember it: who couldn't log in, which listing still showed old hours a week later, which customers called asking things the status page didn't answer. That list is next May's checklist.

Pick your two people and write the three banners this week, while the weather is calm. If you'd like help getting the profile and listings in shape before June, accurate hours and citations are part of the Business Profile work in our local SEO service for Texas businesses.