Your address written three different ways is costing you

Here is a thing that sounds too boring to matter and then turns out to matter quite a lot.

Your business name, address and phone number are written down in a lot of places on the internet. Your website. Your Google profile. Yelp. Bing. Apple Maps. The chamber directory. That trade association you joined in 2019. An old listing from a website you had before this one.

If those do not match each other, Google gets less confident that you are one real business at one real place. And confidence is most of what local ranking is.

What "not matching" actually looks like

It is almost never something dramatic. It is:

Suite 3 on one listing, Ste 3 on another, and nothing at all on a third. A phone number from before you switched providers. Your business name with "LLC" on the end in one place and without it in another. An old address from two moves ago that nobody ever went back and updated. A tracking number from an ad campaign that ran for three months in 2023 and is still sitting on a directory somewhere.

Each one on its own is nothing. Fifteen of them is a business that Google is not quite sure about.

Why it is worth fixing even though it is dull

Because it is one of the few things in search you can completely finish. You cannot finish content and you certainly cannot finish links, but you can absolutely get to the end of your listings and have them all say the same thing.

It is also usually the cheapest ranking improvement available to a business that has been trading for more than a few years, because those are exactly the businesses with the most old listings floating around.

How to do it yourself in an afternoon

Decide the correct version first. Write it down exactly once, exactly as it should appear, including whether you use Suite or Ste and whether the name has LLC in it. Everything else gets matched to that.

Search for your own phone number in quotes. Put it in Google with the quote marks. You will find listings you forgot about. Do the same with your business name and your old phone number if you have one.

Fix the big ones first. Google Business Profile, then your own website, then Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, and Facebook. Those five plus your site are most of the weight.

Then the trade specific ones. Your chamber listing, your industry association, any supplier directory that lists you. These matter more in trades than people expect.

Put the address on your website as text. Not inside a logo, not only in an image of a map. 31% of the local businesses I scanned this year do not have their address written out anywhere a machine can read it.

The one to check first

If you have ever moved, changed phone provider, or rebranded, check for the old details specifically. Those are the listings that never got updated because nobody remembered they existed.

This is included in the $650 a month package and I do it as a one off too. It is also genuinely doable yourself with an afternoon and a spreadsheet, so if that sounds like your kind of afternoon then go for it!