Audit Whenever Contact Details Change, Not Once
- Ongoing A workable routine is to review twice a year and log every change with a date — and it rarely happens quickly.
- Quarter 1 Beyond that set aside time to align whenever contact details change rather than treating it as a one-off project.
- Month 2 Handle the high-authority sources by hand and batch the long tail afterwards.
- Ongoing Work from the aggregators outward, since fixing a source fixes everything downstream, give or take a reporting cycle.
Two Reasons Audits Stall
In the file
Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected.
The complete record
Begin by pulling every existing record into one sheet before changing anything.
Notes on location pages
Claim what exists before creating anything new — duplicates are harder to remove than to avoid.
On the record
Keep a change log; six months on, nobody remembers which field was edited or why.
One rule
Beyond that check by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory.
Foundations of Local Discovery
17% Common traps 26% On the record 38% Ground rules
Every entry in a directory is a minor claim about who {entity_s} is and where it trades. The gain is rarely dramatic on any single day; it appears as better call volume over a quarter.
Write the Canonical Record Down
Photograph or screenshot each profile before editing — reversions do happen.
Gazette of Lantern
It is unglamorous work with an unusually reliable return, which is worth planning around. Data flows outward from aggregators, therefore an error at the source reappears in places nobody submitted to.
Three Fields That Decide the Outcome
More usefully, directory submissions sit unobtrusively behind the scenes, yet business data providers read them constantly, even when nothing else changes. When the opening hours matches everywhere, ranking systems treat the record as settled, once the obvious errors are gone.