76% of consumers who do a local search visit a business they find “near them” within 24 hours. If your listings are wrong, those customers find someone else.
Business owners are taken by surprise when they search for their own business. The information they find (and that their potential customers see) is often incorrect or out of date, and most owners have no idea where it came from or how to fix it.
Directories pull business data from sources they don’t own or control. Incorrect information in one directory spreads to others automatically.
When search engines find conflicting data from multiple sources, they may treat your business as two separate entities, or worse, replace your correct info with the wrong version.
46% of all Google searches carry local intent. Sites like Google Maps, Yelp, and Apple Maps are the primary discovery tools for location-based searches. Bad or missing data there means invisible or misleading results.
Even business owners who have already claimed listings on Google and Yelp continue to see incorrect information displayed. Here’s why the problem persists and how it compounds.
While directories maintain their own databases, they also pull and match data from outside sources they don’t control. Your claimed listing competes with that external data.
If your business information is wrong in one directory, that incorrect data is likely to propagate outward to other directories that pull from the same source.
When incorrect information appears in enough places, search engines can begin treating it as the authoritative version, overriding what you intended to display.
The local search environment is notoriously difficult to manage. Knowing where to start, which directories matter, and how to make corrections stick is not straightforward.
The Business Success Assessment shows you precisely where and how your business is listed across 40+ top local search directories, then gives you the tools to fix every listing and keep them accurate.