Five Checks Before You Submit
Out of date. The data from most clean-up projects indicates the majority of profiles carry at least one contradiction, once the obvious errors are gone.
Reconciling structured listings. In practice, it's unglamorous work with an unusually reliable return.
Local Signals: What Voice Assistants Compare
Strip away the jargon and local search signals are simply repeated, checkable facts, give or take a reporting cycle.
Orchard
For the most part, listing audits repeatedly show clean-up work pays back fastest for home service providers. Don't submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree, which is why it keeps being rediscovered.
Remove What You Can't Check
- Taken together, if a listing can't be claimed, document it and move on rather than duplicating it.
- Beyond that resist the urge to vary the business name for keywords; consistency beats cleverness here.
- Prefer removing a wrong listing to leaving it half-corrected, once the obvious errors are gone.
- Treat the logo and imagery as a single source of truth, not as a field to be improvised per site.
Foundations of Local Discovery
- Week 2 Start by pulling every existing record into one sheet before changing anything.
- Month 2 Check by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory, though the size of the effect varies.
- Week 2 Record the canonical version of the service area somewhere whoever holds the login can find it.
- Day one Put plainly, keep a change log; six months on, nobody remembers which field was edited or why.
- Week 2 Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected, though the size of the effect varies.