You want a customer who looks up your Arkansas business to find the right phone number and the right street address on whichever site they open first. With business listing management, we keep those details the same on the twelve sites we check each month, and we start from your Google Business Profile.
You also want to know who holds the logins once someone else does the work. When we manage your listings, you stay the owner of your Google Business Profile and we work on it as a manager. The accounts stay in your business name for as long as we work together.
We compare those twelve sites against the profile and fix every listing that differs. Each fix gets a written row with the date we made it.
What business listing management covers
Your Google Business Profile is the record every other listing should match. We start there because Google uses the profile to match your business to local searches. If the profile has an old phone number or leaves out a suite number, we would copy the same gap to every listing we match to it. So we confirm the profile and your own website first, and then we bring the other sites in line with that record.
Every other site that lists your business keeps its own copy of your details. A customer can find you through a directory or a map app, and that copy may be older than your profile. Our job is to make every copy match the record and to keep it matched.
The work covers four details on every listing: the business name, the street address, the phone number and the website. The name should appear the same way everywhere, because a customer needs to know that each listing belongs to one business. The suite number counts as much as the street, because a customer uses it to find the right door.
The phone number on every listing should ring your business today. The website line should send people to the site you use now, and a listing with an old website sends them to pages you no longer update. When all four details match on every site, a customer gets the same answer wherever they look.
Who owns the logins
Before you hand listing work to anyone, ask whose account it is. Google settles part of that question in the way it sets up a Business Profile.
A profile has owners and managers, and it has one primary owner. Owners can add or remove users, and they can remove the profile itself. Managers can edit the business information and reply to reviews. A manager cannot add or remove users and cannot remove the profile.
We set up the work around that split. You stay the primary owner, and we work on the profile as a manager. That role gives us the access the listing work needs, and you decide who has access. As the owner, you can remove our manager access yourself at any time.
With a manager login of our own, we correct a detail on the profile ourselves, and you never share your Google password with us. We create or confirm the accounts in your business name at the start of the work.
Before we change a single detail on the profile, we confirm you hold the owner role. A past employee or an old vendor who set up your profile may still hold the owner role, and any owner can add or remove the users on it. If you are not sure which role you hold, tell us when you call, and we check it with you.
The twelve sites we check each month
The twelve sites are Yelp, BBB, Angi, YellowPages, Apple Maps, Facebook, Nextdoor, the Chamber of Commerce, Manta, MapQuest, Foursquare and Bing Places. The list mixes map apps such as Apple Maps and Bing Places with directories such as YellowPages and Manta. A map app gives a customer directions to the address on your listing, and a directory gives them the phone number to call. A customer can find your business on any one of the twelve before they ever visit your website, and the phone number on that listing is the one they dial.
Your pages on Facebook and Nextdoor count as listings too, because a customer can find your phone number and address on them. Each of the twelve gets the same four-line comparison. Because the list stays the same, we can compare each month’s results with the month before.
When we correct a listing, it matches the profile on that day. If the listing changes after that day, we find the change at the next monthly check and correct it again.
How we find a listing that does not match
We put every listing next to the profile record and compare the four details line by line. One listing may show a different street address from the one on your profile. Another may leave out only the suite number.
A listing can also show a phone number or a website that is no longer yours. We count each of those as a difference to fix, because a customer who finds two versions of your details has to guess which one is right.
Your own website gets the same check, because it is the listing you control most directly. The footer and the contact page should match the profile line for line, suite number included. Your footer is on every page of your site, so an old phone number in it shows up on every page a visitor opens. We also compare the footer with the contact page, because the two pages can show different phone numbers when someone updates only one of them.
You can run one comparison yourself this afternoon. Open your Google Business Profile in one browser tab and your Yelp listing in a second tab. Look at the phone number first, because a customer who dials an old number may not reach you. Then compare the rest of the details one line at a time, from the business name down to the website.
Write down each line that differs and the site where you found it. If every line matches, your Yelp listing is in good shape this month. Yelp is one of the twelve sites we check, so send us a link to your profile and we compare the other eleven against it.
If one line differs, you have found the kind of difference we fix, and it would be the first row we write for you. Bring that list when you call us, and we start with the lines you found.
How we fix it and prove the fix
When a listing does not match the profile, we correct the listing so its four details match. Then we write one row for that listing with four things in it: the site, what differs, the fix we made and the date we made it.
Take a missing suite number on Manta. We add the suite number to the Manta listing, and then we write Manta, the missing suite number, the added suite number and the date in its row. When a YellowPages listing shows an old phone number, we put the current number on it, and that listing gets a row of its own.
A fix counts as done only after we check the live listing the way a visitor sees it. If the live page still shows the old detail, the row stays open until the live page matches.
The next month we check every fixed listing again. If one no longer matches, we fix it again and write a new row. When you ask what changed on a site and when, we answer from those rows.
How listings connect to your local rankings
Google says it ranks local results on three things. Relevance comes first, and it means how well your profile matches what the person searched for. Distance is second: how far your business is from the person searching. Google describes prominence, the third, as how well known your business is.
Relevance starts with the profile, and a profile with a missing detail has less to match against a search. Google also publishes a list of actions an owner can take on a profile. The list includes verifying the business, keeping the information complete and current, replying to reviews and adding photos. With business listing management, we keep your profile complete and current, and we copy the same four details to the twelve sites.
We also manage Google Business Profiles as a job of their own. Our post on Google Business Profile optimization explains that side of the work. If your business does not show up in local results at all, start with our post on why a business goes missing from local search listings.
What you get each month
You get one PDF report a month, and every account stays in your business name. Ty Woods answers for the work himself, and you can reach him directly.
Business listing management is part of our local rankings service. Five of us manage eight client accounts, and we do the listing work ourselves from Arkansas. Our own staff also handles SEO, website content, Google Ads management and Meta Ads management.
Call us at +1 501.232.1017, or send us a link to your Google Business Profile through our contact page. We look at it with you and show you what we would fix first. The consultation costs nothing.