Name, address and phone consistency is sold as one job at one price, and it is not one job. An address that disagrees with your profile can get you suspended. A phone number that disagrees can cost you the call and any hope of knowing where it came from. A misspelt suite number on a directory nobody visits costs approximately nothing, and it is where most of the billed hours go.
Rank the three fields by what an error actually does
Address. The highest-risk field by some distance. Two records showing different streets for the same business is the kind of conflict that puts a profile in front of a reviewer, and reviewers find whatever else was already wrong. The mechanism is set out in why local citations still matter for SEO.
Phone number. Lower risk to your rankings, highest risk to your revenue, because it is the only one of the three a customer acts on directly. Nobody types your address into anything. Plenty of people tap a number, and if that number is four years old the call is ringing somewhere else entirely.
Name. Matters mostly because it is what people search for and what they expect to recognise. It also matters because editing it to something more aspirational is one of the most reliable ways to lose a profile, as covered in most suspensions start with an edit.
The inconsistency contractors create deliberately
Call tracking puts one number on the website and a different one on the profile. It is a deliberate mismatch, and it is the thing owners worry about most and understand least.
Google’s own guidance accommodates it. A tracking number can be used as the primary number on the profile provided it forwards to your real line, with the main line listed as an additional number. Done that way, the profile still contains the number that appears everywhere else, you keep the attribution, and nothing about it is a policy problem.
What causes damage is the careless version: a tracking number that stops working when a contract ends and now rings nowhere, or a different tracking number pushed out to every directory so that no two records agree on anything. Tracking is worth doing properly rather than avoiding, and how it fits together is covered in our call tracking work.
Where consistency genuinely earns its keep
A short list of records is worth being exact about: your Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, the major review directories, your own website, and your licensing and registration records.
Add to that any record still showing a previous address, wherever it lives. Those are disproportionately important, because stale records are what Google rebuilds a phantom duplicate listing from months after you cleaned one up, as described in duplicates come from losing the login.
Past that list the returns fall away quickly. Paying for a monthly audit of two hundred directories is largely paying for a report.
The inconsistency nobody audits
Whether the number rings, and who answers it.
Call your own business number from a phone that is not in your contacts, at seven on a Saturday evening. A perfectly consistent number that reaches voicemail on the night people have emergencies is a more expensive failure than any formatting error in any directory. It is consistent, and it is useless.
The same test applies to every number that exists anywhere with your name on it. Every one of them should reach a person, or reach a recording that says something worth hearing.
Keeping it steady
- Decide the exact format once and write it down. Whether the name carries the LLC, how the suite number is written, which number is primary. Then use only that.
- Change one record at a time and keep a list of what you changed. Bulk edits across a profile are their own risk.
- When you move, update Google first, then the majors, then everything else. And edit the existing profile rather than creating a new one.
- Re-check the majors once or twice a year. Aggregated data has a way of reappearing.
Frequently asked questions
Does a call tracking number hurt local rankings?
Not when it is set up as intended, with the tracking number as the primary and the real line listed as an additional number. The problems come from abandoned tracking numbers and from different numbers scattered across directories.
How exact does the address formatting have to be?
The components need to match. Whether you write Ste or Suite is not what suspends profiles. A different street, a former address, or a suite number that disagrees with the one on your lease is a different matter.
Do I need to fix every directory listing?
No. Fix the major platforms and anything anywhere still showing an old address or an old phone number. The long tail of small directories absorbs a great deal of effort and returns very little.
What is the most damaging inconsistency?
An old address still live somewhere on the web, because it both creates a data conflict and gives Google the material to regenerate a duplicate listing later.
Where to start
Tonight, after hours, ring your own business number from a phone the office will not recognise. Whatever happens next is more useful than any citation report you will be shown this year.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our call tracking or book a strategy call.
