The Contact Details in Six Places

More copies than you remember

On the site alone, the details usually appear in the header, the footer, the contact page, and often an about page.

Then there is the business listing, the directories you submitted to years ago, the trade association profile, the social accounts, and whatever a supplier or partner published about you.

Six is a low estimate for an established business. Fifteen to twenty is more typical once directories are counted, and most owners can name about four of them.

How they stop matching

Nobody changes them incorrectly on purpose. They drift, one small event at a time.

A new phone number is updated on the site and the listing, and not on the eleven directories nobody remembers.

A suite number gets added after a building is renumbered.

The business name is written three ways: with the legal suffix, without it, and with an ampersand instead of the word and.

Each of those is trivially small and the accumulated effect is a set of records that no longer agree.

Why it matters

Two reasons, one mechanical and one human.

Mechanically, search engines use consistency across sources as one signal of whether a business is real and where it is. Records that agree reinforce each other; records that disagree have to be reconciled, and confidence in all of them drops slightly.

It is one factor among many rather than the deciding one, and it is unusual in being entirely within your control and costing nothing but time.

The human reason is more direct. A customer who finds an old number and calls it does not investigate further. They call the next business on the list.

What counts as inconsistent

• A different phone number, including an old one still forwarding.
• A missing or added suite number.
• The legal suffix present in some places and not others.
• Abbreviations such as street against st, or road against rd.
• A former address from before you moved.
• Different opening hours, especially seasonal ones.

The middle items matter less than people claim, and the first and fifth matter a great deal.

Write down the canonical version

Before touching anything, decide the single correct form and put it in a document.

The exact business name as you want it shown, the full address formatted one way, one phone number, one email address, and the hours.

This sounds trivial and it is the step that makes the rest possible, because without it you are correcting records against your memory of what they should say, which is how inconsistency arises in the first place.

Keep the document somewhere shared, so that whoever updates a listing in two years uses the same version you did.

Fix your own site first

It is the source everything else should agree with, and it is the one place you fully control.

Check the header, the footer, the contact page, any location pages, and the text inside images, since a phone number sitting in a graphic will not be found by searching the site and will not be readable to a screen reader either.

If your site publishes structured business information for search engines, confirm that matches too, because it is frequently generated from a setting somebody filled in once and never revisited.

Then the copies you do not control

Start with the ones that get traffic rather than trying to be exhaustive.

Your main business listing first, since it is what most local searchers actually see.

Then the large general directories, your trade or professional association, your chamber of commerce, and any supplier or manufacturer that publishes a dealer or installer list.

Search your phone number and your business name in quotation marks to find the ones you have forgotten. The results are usually surprising and include at least one site you have never heard of.

A worked example

A dental practice moved two blocks in 2018 and updated the website and the main listing the same week.

In early 2021 a search for the practice name and phone number found nineteen places publishing their details.

Six still showed the old address. Four showed a phone number retired in 2017 that forwarded to a line nobody answered.

Two of those four were insurance directories that patients actively use to choose a provider.

Correcting all nineteen took about five hours spread over two weeks, most of it spent on account recovery for directories nobody remembered joining.

The forwarded number was the finding that mattered: it had been ringing out for three years, and nobody had ever heard about it, because a caller who gets no answer does not send an email to explain.

Changing a number properly

If you are about to change one, the sequence matters.

Get the new number working first, then update every record, and only then retire the old one.

Keep the old number forwarding for at least a year, and preferably longer, because printed material, vehicle signage, and other people's records outlive any update you make online.

A forwarded old number that rings somewhere answered is a safety net. A forwarded old number that rings somewhere unanswered is worse than a disconnected one, because a disconnected number at least tells the caller to look again.

The counter-case

This can absorb unlimited time for diminishing returns, and it is worth being realistic about the limit.

Chasing dozens of low-quality directories, some of which exist to sell you a correction service, is not a good use of a day.

A sensible standard is: your own site perfect, your main listing perfect, the top ten or so places that actually send you visitors correct, and the rest left alone.

Note also that some listings cannot be corrected because the account was created by somebody long gone. In those cases the practical answer is a removal request rather than an update, and if that fails, accepting it and moving on.

The procedure

1. Write the canonical version down and share it.
2. Fix your own site, including text inside images.
3. Search your name and number in quotation marks.
4. List every place that publishes your details.
5. Correct the ones that matter, starting with your main listing.
6. Test every old number to hear where it lands.
7. Diarise a recheck in twelve months.

The sixth is the one that finds the expensive problem, and it takes about four minutes.

The listing itself is the anchor for all of this, covered in claiming your Google My Business listing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.