The Local Listing Audit

Listings drift. A number changes, a suite gets dropped, someone creates a second profile, hours go stale over a holiday. None of it announces itself. You find out when the phone is quieter than it should be, and by then it has been months.

This is a pass you can run yourself in about fifteen minutes. Do it four times a year and put it in the calendar with a name against it.

Before you start: write down the truth

One block of text, saved somewhere everyone can reach. Everything below is checked against this.

Business name: exactly as you trade, without keywords bolted on

Address: as the postal service formats it, suite included

Phone: one number, that a person answers

Hours: including the awkward ones

If you cannot agree internally on any of those three lines, stop. That is the actual problem, and no amount of listing management fixes it.

Part one: search for yourself, properly

Do this in a private browsing window, and from a phone on cellular rather than your office network. Results are personalized, and the version you see logged in at your own desk is a version nobody else gets.

• Search your business name in quotes. Note what appears and whether anything is wrong.
• Search your phone number on its own. This finds listings you forgot you had.
• Search your old phone number. This finds the ones actively sending calls nowhere.
• Search your old address, if you have moved.
• Search your main service plus your town, from three different points in your area.

Write down every listing you find. Most businesses find between eight and thirty, and are surprised by about half.

Part two: the Google Business Profile

This is where almost all of the value is. Everything else is secondary.

• Primary category is the most specific one matching your best revenue line, not the broadest one covering everything.
• Secondary categories are all services you would genuinely take work for. Remove any you would decline.
• Name matches your truth block, with no added keywords.
• Address is correct and complete, or correctly hidden if you are a service area business.
• Service areas list only places you have actually worked in the last twelve months.
• Hours are phone-answering hours, and holiday hours are set for the next two holidays.
• Phone is your permanent number, not a tracking number.
• Website link points at a page that backs up what the listing claims, not just the homepage.
• Photos include something added in the last three months.
• Services and description are filled in rather than left half empty.
• Questions on the listing have been answered by you, not by strangers.

Part three: duplicates

• Search Maps for your name, your number, and your street plus your category.
• Note any second listing with your details in any combination.
• For each one: can you claim it? Try. If the managing email is masked, it is often enough to work out who has it.
• Request a merge, not a deletion. Deleting throws away the reviews.
• If you moved, the old listing gets updated to the new address or merged. It does not get marked permanently closed.

Part four: the other listings that matter

In order. Stop when the returns get thin.

• Apple Maps
• Bing Places
• Facebook
• The main data aggregators, which feed dozens of smaller directories
• Your trade association or licensing board
• The two or three industry directories your customers actually check

Check each against the truth block. Fix what you can edit. Note what you cannot, and check it again next quarter, because fixing the sources upstream often corrects it on its own.

Part five: reviews

• How many arrived this quarter? Two a month is a healthy business.
• Have you replied to all of them, good and bad?
• Is your review link somewhere your team can reach it in one tap?
• Is there a trigger in your process that fires the ask? Job complete, invoice sent, second visit finished.

If the answer to the last one is no, that is why the count is zero. Nobody remembers a new task.

Part six: the things only a phone call catches

• Call your own number from a phone that is not on your network. Does it ring where you think?
• Call it at nine in the morning, at six in the evening, and on a Saturday.
• Tap the number on your own website. Does it dial?
• Submit your own contact form and confirm it arrives somewhere a person is watching.

This section catches more lost business than every other part of the audit combined, and it takes four minutes.

The record

Keep a short log. Date, what you found, what you fixed, what you could not.

Date	Found	Fixed	Still open

The log matters because it turns “a duplicate appeared again” into a pattern you can trace to a source, rather than a thing you vaguely remember dealing with once.

What this will not do

It will not move you above a competitor who is physically closer to the searcher. Proximity is the biggest factor in local results and no amount of listing hygiene beats a shorter distance.

What it does is make sure you are eligible for everything you should be, and that nobody is calling a number you stopped paying for. That is worth fifteen minutes, four times a year.