Your Address in Three Places, Written Three Ways

Why consistency is a signal at all

Search engines assemble a picture of a local business from many sources: your site, your listing, directories, associations, chambers of commerce, and anywhere else you appear.

Matching those up is a matching problem. Identical details across many sources are easy to associate confidently. Details that differ slightly are harder, and confidence is what gets rewarded.

It is not that a mismatch is penalised. It is that a consistent set is more convincing, and local results reward convincing.

How the variation happens

Nobody sets out to write their address three ways. It accumulates.

• Different people entered it at different times, each using their own convention.
• A form imposed a format, such as requiring a separate unit field.
• The business moved and some listings were updated and others were not.
• The phone number changed and the old one survives in three directories.
• A tracking number was used in one place and the real one elsewhere.
• The legal name and trading name are both in use, inconsistently.

The last is worth attention. If you incorporated as one name and trade as another, decide which one appears publicly and use it everywhere.

The three things to standardise

Write them down once, in one document, exactly as they should appear.

The name. Exactly as you trade, without a town or a service appended.

The address. Including whether it is Unit, Suite or a number sign, whether the street type is abbreviated, and how the postal code is spaced.

The phone number. One format, one number, the one that actually reaches you.

That document is the reference. Everything else gets corrected to match it rather than each listing being decided on its own.

Where to check

1. Your website footer and contact page.
2. Your business listing.
3. Social profiles, which frequently carry an old address.
4. Directories you or somebody else submitted to years ago.
5. Association and chamber pages.
6. Anywhere a supplier lists you as a dealer or approved installer.

The sixth is the one people forget and it is often the most authoritative. A manufacturer's dealer locator carrying a ten-year-old address is a strong signal pointing at the wrong place.

The phone number question

Worth handling deliberately because it is where the most damage happens.

A business that changed numbers, or added a mobile, frequently ends up with two in circulation. Old directories keep the old one, which may now belong to somebody else entirely.

Pick one primary number and use it everywhere. If you need a second, it can appear on your own site as an additional contact, but it should not become the number in listings.

Call tracking numbers deserve a caution. Using a different number in each channel breaks consistency deliberately, which is a real trade rather than a free measurement.

A worked example

A physiotherapy clinic that had moved two suites within the same building.

The listing was updated. The website footer was updated. What was not updated: two directory entries, the professional association page, an insurer's provider list, and the sign-up they had done with a local business network in 2015.

Six sources carried the old suite number, and one carried a phone number from before the move.

Patients occasionally arrived at the wrong door, which was the visible symptom. The invisible one was that they had stopped appearing in the map results for their own street.

Correcting the six took about two hours spread across a fortnight, mostly waiting for replies. Visibility recovered over the following months.

Nothing had been done wrong. They had updated the two places they controlled and not thought about the six they did not.

What counts as different enough to matter

Some proportion, since this can become obsessive.

Genuinely worth fixing: a different suite number, a different street number, a different phone number, a materially different business name, or an old address entirely.

Worth fixing when convenient: Street against St, Suite against Unit, postal code spacing, a missing province.

Not worth losing sleep over: capitalisation, whether there is a period after an abbreviation.

The first list changes what business is being described. The others are cosmetic variations of the same information, and chasing them is a poor use of an afternoon that could be spent on the ones that matter.

What this is not

Worth separating from a service that gets sold on the back of it.

Citation building, where a company submits your details to two hundred directories, is a different activity. Most of those directories have no visitors and no authority, and a hundred entries on sites nobody reads adds little.

What matters is that the sources which already carry your details are correct, and that the handful with genuine standing in your area exist and are accurate.

Fixing eight real listings beats creating two hundred artificial ones, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.

Doing the audit once

An afternoon, and it does not need repeating often.

Search your business name and note every result that carries your details. Search your phone number, which finds listings you did not know existed. Search your old address if you have moved.

Then work through them, correcting each to match your reference document. Some will need a login you no longer have, and some will need an email asking the owner to update it.

Expect a handful to be unfixable. That is fine; the goal is the majority being right rather than perfection.

Keep a note of which ones you could not change and why. Next time somebody tells you a directory is wrong, you will already know whether it is one you gave up on.

Keeping it that way

The habit that prevents the next round.

When something changes, work from the list rather than from memory. Update the reference document first, then every source on it.

And whenever somebody asks for your details for a directory, a supplier page or an association, copy and paste them from the document rather than typing them fresh. Typing is where the variations come from in the first place.

That single habit is what stops the variation reappearing over the following five years, and it takes no longer than typing it out would have.

The listing that sits at the centre of all this is 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.