Resources / 6 min read
Your business details are wrong somewhere online right now
Somewhere out there is a directory listing for your business with your old number on it. Or the address from two premises ago, or a version of your name you stopped using in 2019. You didn’t put it there, you can’t remember it existing, and it’s working against you anyway.
This is one of the least glamorous jobs in local marketing, and one of the better-value afternoons you can spend on your business. Here’s why, and how to do it once, properly.
Why a wrong listing costs you
Two ways, and the second one is sneakier than the first.
The obvious way: customers hit a dead end. Someone finds your business on an old directory, rings the number, and gets a disconnected tone or a stranger. They don’t dig further. They call the next name on the list, and you never know the enquiry existed. A wrong listing doesn’t look like lost work. It looks like a quiet week.
The quiet way: Google trusts you a little less. Google builds its picture of your business from everywhere your name, address and phone number appear, not just your website and profile. That trio gets called NAP: name, address, phone. When every mention agrees, Google can be confident the business is real, established, and where it says it is. When the mentions disagree, that confidence drops, and confidence is part of what decides where you show up. Your consistency is one of the few ranking inputs you fully control.
Neither effect is dramatic on its own. But listings rot silently for years, and the damage compounds while you’re busy doing the actual work.
Where the wrong ones hide
The usual suspects for a New Zealand or Australian service business:
The directories that came free with something. Yellow, White Pages, Localist, and their Australian cousins. Many businesses got listed automatically years ago, from a phone account or a long-forgotten sign-up, with whatever details were current at the time.
Trade and industry sites. Builderscrack, NoCowboys, hipages, industry association member pages. If you joined, trialled or claimed anything, there’s a listing, and it has whatever you typed on the day.
Social profiles you don’t use. The Facebook page from 2016 still shows your old number to everyone who finds it. Facebook pages rank in Google searches for your business name, so people do find it.
Map and data services. Apple Maps and Bing Places run their own listings. So do the data companies that feed dozens of smaller sites: fix the source and the copies slowly follow.
Your own website. Genuinely worth checking. We regularly see a site whose footer, contact page and header show two different numbers, usually because one got updated and the others didn’t.
The 20-minute audit
First, write down the correct version. One exact name, one address (or service area), one phone number, one website. Character for character, the way it appears on your Google Business Profile. This is your master copy, and everything else gets matched to it. If your profile itself needs work, sort that first with the 15-minute profile task.
Then go looking for yourself. Search your business name in a private browser window. Search your old phone number in quotes. Search your name plus your old suburb. Go three or four pages deep, past where customers usually stop, because Google reads all of it even when customers don’t. List every place you appear and what each one says.
Most businesses find something within ten minutes. Old numbers are the most common, followed by old addresses and spelling variations of the business name.
The cleanup
Work through the list, worst first: a wrong phone number beats a missing listing for urgency, because it actively sends your calls into the void.
Claim before you correct. Most directories let you claim a listing with an email or phone verification. Once claimed, update every field to the master copy, then paste in a decent description and a few real photos while you’re there. A claimed, complete listing is worth more than a bare correct one.
Can’t claim it? Ask. Nearly every directory has a report or contact option for corrections. Slow, but it works more often than not.
Kill the true orphans. A listing for a business name you no longer trade under, or a location you left years ago, is better removed than corrected. Most sites will remove a listing when the owner asks.
Don’t chase every tiny site to zero. Get your Google Business Profile, your website, the major maps and the top handful of directories perfectly aligned, and you’ve captured most of the value. The long tail can wait for a rainy day.
Keeping it clean
Listings only go wrong when something changes, so tie the check to the change: new number, new premises, new trading name, rebrand. That’s the moment the rot starts, and the moment to spend the afternoon again. In between, a once-a-year search of your own name is plenty.
And keep the master copy written down somewhere you’ll find it. The whole discipline is one sentence: everywhere your business appears, it appears identically.
Clean listings are foundation work: invisible when right, costly when wrong. At Latetwenties we get local service businesses found online and chosen by the right customers, and listing cleanup is part of every build we do. If you’d rather see the whole picture first, the five reasons a business doesn’t show up on Google is a good place to start.