The Quiet Work of Documenting Listings
| Field | What to check | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Worth checking | Do not submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree. | as part of the monthly reporting cycle |
| First pass | Photograph or screenshot each profile before editing; reversions do happen. | whenever contact details change |
| Ground rules | Prefer removing a wrong listing to leaving it half-corrected. | at the start of every quarter |
| Common traps | At the same time, fix the name, address and phone number before touching anything decorative. | at least annually |
| Before you rebuild | What follows from this is that check what a competitor over a wide service radius has claimed before deciding where to submit. | on a fixed schedule |
| The clean record | If a listing cannot be claimed, document it and move on rather than duplicating it. | on a fixed schedule |
Audit Whenever Contact Details Change, Not Once
The core contact record. For the most part, the pattern across audits is that more than half of the problems trace back to a single unclaimed profile.
Fixing mismatched opening hours. Compared with link building, this work is slower to feel exciting and faster to pay off.
After you prune. Give one person the logins and one document the truth; ambiguity is what causes drift.
Refreshing without drift. Even so, work from the aggregators outward, since fixing a source fixes everything downstream.
Start With the Records You Already Have
Where whoever updates the website has changed twice, expect unverified claims somewhere in the profile.
Basalt
By contrast, record the canonical version of the website field somewhere the person on reception can find it. Twenty verified profiles outperform two hundred abandoned ones, every time.
Remove What You Cannot Check
51% After you standardise 61% Verifying without drift 37% Consolidating without drift
Every entry in a directory is a small claim about who {entity_s} is and where it trades. Where an ad stops working the moment the budget ends, a corrected record does not.
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