The Case for Current Listings
Phone taps
In the main, keep a change log; six months on, nobody remembers which field was edited or why, which is why it keeps being rediscovered.
Map pack entries audit
Typically, a workable routine is to refresh every month and log every change with a date.
Ground rules
Give one person the logins and one document the truth; ambiguity is what causes drift.
Brand mentions, briefly
More usefully, claim what exists before creating anything new, duplicates are harder to remove than to avoid.
How a Profile Goes Stale
31% Notes on structured listings 78% The aggregator feeds verify 55% On the record 84% Checking the logo and imagery
Broadly, ranking systems rarely announce a penalty here, they merely rank a less certain record lower. Taken together, keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work, give or take a reporting cycle.
Verifying the Long Tail
In the file. Where whoever updates the website has changed twice, expect an inconsistent phone number somewhere in the profile.
Still open. Nobody sends a warning when silent listing decay surfaces, which is why audits find it years late.
Avoiding duplicate profiles. Frequently, anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected, once the obvious errors are gone.
Why Law Firms Lose Ground Without Noticing
Do
- More usefully, photograph or screenshot each profile before editing, reversions do happen.
- Do not submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree.
- Resist the urge to vary the business name for keywords; consistency beats cleverness here.
Avoid
- The worst outcome is not a wrong listing but two right-looking listings that disagree.
- In most cases, the usual culprit is contradictory data across sources, unobtrusively inherited from an old listing nobody remembers creating.
- The cost of a misplaced service area is not a penalty; it is being unobtrusively ranked below someone tidier, regardless of sector.
See also