Directories and review portals: which listings matter, what each needs, and the facts that must match

What a listing does for an answer, and what it does not

An assistant asked for a business in a town names businesses, not the sites that list them. In the probe that accompanied our audit of 9,483 small business websites, one buyer question per business went to Claude with web retrieval on, and of every name it gave, 99.4% were actual businesses. Directories and aggregators were 0.6%. A listing is not a way into the answer by itself.

What a listing can be is a source. When an answer names you, it may draw your hours, your phone number or your services from a directory page, and when it shows its sources you can see which. A complete, current listing gives an answer the right fact to repeat; a stale one gives it the wrong one. That makes a listing a brand mention you partly control, and its value is agreement, not volume.

Which listings are worth having

Fewer than most listing services suggest, and chosen for use rather than count. A listing is worth its upkeep if buyers in your trade use the site, if answers about your trade cite it, or if it is the kind of list only a real business can be on.

Start from the sources your panel's answers cite. If the answers for your trade keep citing one directory, a complete entry there is worth more than twenty entries on sites nobody reads. Optimizing your Google Business Profile covers the map listing most businesses start with.

The facts that have to match, everywhere

The same four facts on every listing and on your own site: the business's name as it appears on the sign, one address written one way, one main phone number, and the hours by day. Add the website address and, where the listing has them, the services and the area you serve. Write them on your own site first, as the reference, then copy them outward character for character.

Most inconsistency starts at home. In the audit, 43.1% of the sites told a different story about who and where the business is across their own homepage, contact page and about page, 36.9% showed more than one phone number, and 34.1% gave no postal address a machine could parse. A business that corrects twenty listings against a site with two phone numbers has corrected the copies and left the original wrong.

• One name. Not the name on the sign in one place and the legal name, a shortened name or a name with the town added in another.
• One address, with the suite or unit, written the way your mail arrives.
• One main number. A call-tracking number on a listing is a second number to any reader comparing pages.
• Hours by day, with special hours for holidays, changed on every listing on the same day.
• The website address, pointing at the page that matches the listing, such as the location page for a business with several.

What else a good listing carries

Past the four facts, fill in what the listing allows and your site states: the services by their plain names, the area you serve, a short description of what the business is and does, and photos with captions that say what they show. Leave out what the listing's rules exclude; Google's Business Profile guidelines, for instance, rule out services or locations added to the business name and categories used as keywords.

Reviews on a portal are customers' words, not yours. Ask for them honestly, under each platform's own rules, reply to them briefly and factually, and quote a few on your own site as text with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform. Keep the portal's rating out of your own markup: Google's review snippet rules say not to aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites.

Joining the listings to your site

Link from your site to your own listings, and list their addresses in the business markup's sameAs property, which schema.org defines as a URL that unambiguously identifies the same thing elsewhere. Together with one name, one address and one phone number, that tells any reader the listings and the site describe one business. Building an entity shows the markup.

Duplicates, old listings and the upkeep

1. Keep a sheet with every listing: the site, the address of the entry, who can edit it, and the date you last checked it.
2. Search each platform for your business name, old names and old addresses, and for your phone number, to find duplicates and forgotten entries.
3. Merge or remove duplicates through each platform's own process, and mark a closed location as closed rather than leaving it to look open.
4. When a fact changes, change it on your own site first, then down the sheet in the same order, and note the date.
5. Check the whole sheet once a quarter, and ask the assistants a question the change should answer to see which version comes back.