Your business details are scattered across more places than you think. Google, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, your trade association, the chamber of commerce, three directories you never signed up for, an old franchise page, and the sponsor list of a youth baseball team from 2019.
When those disagree, two things happen. Search engines get less confident about which version is true, and customers call a number nobody answers.
The second one is the expensive one, and nobody measures it.
What counts as a mismatch
More than you would guess. Search systems are reasonably good at matching “Street” to “St,” but the ones that matter are:
- A number that is not yours anymore. The worst kind, because the calls are gone and you never hear about them.
- A suite number that is wrong or missing. Especially in a building with several businesses.
- An old address you moved out of. Common, and it can keep ranking for years.
- A different business name. “Smith Plumbing” in one place, “Smith Plumbing and Heating LLC” in another, “Smith Bros Plumbing” in a third.
- A tracking number on some listings and your real number on others. Pick one for public listings.
Decide what the correct version is
Before you fix anything, write down the one true version. All three lines, exactly as they should appear everywhere:
- The name you trade under, not necessarily your legal filing name, and not your name with three keywords bolted on the end.
- The address as the postal service formats it, suite included.
- One phone number that a person answers.
Save that somewhere. Every fix from here is making the world match that block of text.
On the name: adding keywords to your business name on Google is against the rules, competitors report it, and listings do get corrected or suspended for it. If your legal name genuinely includes the words, fine. If you added them for search, take them out.
Find where you are listed
Search your business name in quotes. Search your phone number on its own, which finds listings you forgot. Search your old phone number, which finds the ones actively hurting you. Search your old address if you have moved.
Work through the results and make a list. Most businesses find between eight and thirty entries, and are surprised by half of them.
Fix them in order
Not all listings are worth the same effort. Do them in this order and stop when the returns get thin.
1. Google Business Profile. Everything else is secondary.
2. Apple Maps. Anyone with an iPhone asking for directions.
3. Bing Places. Smaller, and it feeds other systems including some voice assistants.
4. Facebook. Often the second result for a business name search.
5. The big data aggregators. Several directories pull from a small number of sources, so correcting a source fixes a dozen downstream listings you would otherwise chase one at a time.
6. Your industry’s directories. The trade association, the licensing board, the two or three sites your customers actually check.
7. Everything else. Diminishing returns. Fix them if they are easy, ignore them if they want a subscription.
The ones you cannot edit
You will find listings on sites with no obvious way to contact anyone. Some are scraped copies that will update themselves once the sources upstream are right. Some are dead sites nobody maintains.
Fix the sources, wait a couple of months, and check again. Do not pay a service to remove a listing from a directory nobody visits.
Keep it from happening again
The reason details drift is that nobody owns them. Fix that with three small habits:
- One document with the correct block of text. Anyone setting up an account copies from it.
- A rule about phone numbers. If you run call tracking, decide now which listings get a tracking number and which get the real one, and write it down. Mixed tracking numbers across listings is one of the most common causes of this whole problem.
- A step in your moving checklist. If you ever change address or number, updating listings is a task with a name on it, not something someone remembers in March.
Twenty minutes, right now
- Write the correct name, address and phone in a document.
- Search your phone number and your old phone number, and list what you find.
- Fix Google, Apple, Bing and Facebook today.
- Note anything you cannot edit and check it again in two months.
- Call your own number from a phone that is not on your network, and make sure it rings where you think it does.
That last step is not a joke. It catches problems no amount of listing management will show you.
