Fix your name, address and phone everywhere

Why consistency matters

Google's guidance lists information from across the web among the inputs to prominence, and its systems connect mentions of a business by matching name, address and phone. A business listed as “Murphy Plumbing” on the profile, “Murphy's Plumbing Ltd” on a directory and “J. Murphy Plumber” on an old listing, with two different numbers, presents as three weak entities rather than one strong one. Consistency is not about the search engine being fussy; it is about it being able to tell that these are the same business.

Decide the reference values

From the profile chapter: the trading name exactly as used, the address with the Eircode in one fixed form, and one phone number in one format. Write them down. Every listing from here on matches them character for character.

Fix your own properties first

The website's footer, contact page and structured data, which the structured data chapter covers. The Google Business Profile. Social profiles the business controls. These are the sources other sites copy from, so they are corrected first, and they are the ones a search engine trusts most.

Find the rest

Search the business name in quotes, the phone number in quotes, and the old number and old address if there were any. Directories, trade bodies, review sites, map services other than Google, event listings and supplier pages all turn up. Record each in a spreadsheet: the site, the URL, what it shows, whether it matches, and who to contact. Expect a long tail of listings nobody remembers creating.

Correct at source

Most directories allow a claim-and-edit or an update request. Correct the listing, or if the site is defunct or unresponsive, note it and move on; a handful of uncorrectable stale listings do not undo the work. Listings that were created for a previous business at the same address are someone else's and need reporting, not editing. Progress is slow, because sites update on their own schedules; the spreadsheet's status column is the record.

Illustrative example. A dental practice that changed its number three years ago finds the old number on eleven listings and its current one on four. It corrects its own site and profile first, then submits updates to the eleven over a fortnight, and marks two as unresponsive. That describes the work, not an outcome.

Output

The spreadsheet, with every listing found and its status. It is reused in the next chapter, building citations, which adds listings rather than correcting them.