Business directory listings: which ones matter for a local business.

What a citation is, and what it does

A citation is any mention of your business's name, address and phone number on a site other than your own: a directory, a map app, a review site, your trade association's member list. Some carry a link to your website. Many do not.

What they do for you, most useful first:

• They put you where some customers look. Plenty of people search in Apple Maps, Bing or Yelp and never see your Google profile.
• They feed other services. Business data companies sell listings to car navigation systems, apps and smaller directories, so one wrong record can spread a long way.
• They keep Google's picture straight. Google says it builds profiles partly from public web pages and data it licenses from other companies, so wrong details elsewhere can turn into changes on your profile, as why Google changed your business hours explains.
• Some carry links, which Google counts as part of how well known a business is. How a local business gets links from other websites covers the ones worth having.

What they do not do is lift your map ranking by sheer number. Google's current help on local ranking names reviews and links from other websites behind prominence. It does not mention directory listings. Treat citations as housekeeping that prevents problems, not as a way to climb.

The short list for every country

These are worth doing for almost any business that serves customers in person:

• Your Google Business Profile, first, because everything else should copy it. How to set up a Google Business Profile covers it.
• Apple Business, for Apple Maps and Siri. Apple Business Connect walks through the claim.
• Bing Places for Business, now at bing.com/forbusiness. Microsoft describes it as free, it can import your Google profile, and Microsoft says the import keeps your name, hours and contact details. Listings show in Bing search and Bing Maps.
• A Facebook page with the same name, address, phone number and hours.
• Yelp, where people in your country use it. Yelp says a business page is free to claim and manage, including replies to reviews.
• The register or member directory of your trade body or regulator, which customers use to check you are who you say you are.

None of them needs a paid service. Work through them with your login details and the master record described below, and the short list is done.

In the US: the data companies behind the apps

In the US, some of the business data in sat navs, voice assistants, apps and small directories comes from companies that sell listings in bulk. Data Axle is one, and it supplies business listings to other directories and apps. Foursquare is another: it sells place data to other companies for their apps.

You do not need to chase every app they supply. If a wrong address or phone number keeps turning up in apps and car navigation, a data company's record is a likely source, and correcting it there reaches everything it feeds. Check your record with them after any move or change of number.

Your local chamber of commerce and any business improvement district list members too. Those listings come with membership rather than for sale, and people do read them.

In Europe: each country's own directories

Europe has no single set of data companies. Each country has its own directories, often the old printed phone book now run as a website and an app: Yell in the UK, Gelbe Seiten and Das Örtliche in Germany, PagesJaunes in France, Páginas Amarillas in Spain and PagineGialle in Italy.

Many still hold a listing for you from phone book days, with whatever details you had then. Search for your business on the main one in your country. If a listing exists, claim it and correct it. The paid packages these directories sell are rarely needed: a correct basic entry does the job.

Then add the registers that matter in your trade and country. In the UK, people check a gas engineer on the Gas Safe Register and a solicitor through the Law Society's search, so a law firm or a heating engineer should make sure those entries are complete, current and linked to the website.

Keep the name, address and phone number identical

Name, address and phone number, often shortened to NAP, should read the same everywhere, along with your hours and website. Small differences pile up: Unit 4 on one site and 4 on another, a missing postcode, an old freephone number that still rings somewhere.

Write one master record and copy from it every time:

• The business name exactly as on your sign and your Google profile.
• The address in one format, with the unit number always in the same place.
• One main phone number, the same as on your website and profile.
• The website address, starting https, with or without www as your site uses it.
• Opening hours, and the date you last changed them.
• A category and a one-line description, for sites that ask.

Keep it in a shared document, with a list of every site you are listed on, the login for each and the date you last checked it. When something changes, the list tells you where to go.

Copy and paste from the master record every time. Retyping an address from memory is how a listing ends up one digit out.

Booking and marketplace profiles count too

Your public page on a booking platform, a reservation app or a trade marketplace is a listing as well, and often a busy one. A salon's page on its booking platform, a restaurant's page on its reservation app and a plumber's profile on a lead marketplace all show a name, an address and usually hours.

Give them the same details as the master record. Some of these companies can also add their own booking or ordering links to your Google profile, so when you stop using one, close the page there too. How to add a booking button to your Google Business Profile covers removing a link you did not add.

Duplicate listings on other sites

Directories pick up businesses from many sources, so you may find two entries for yourself on the same site: one from years ago with an old number, one you created. Do not add a third. Claim the one with the most history, correct it, and ask the site to remove or merge the other.

On Google itself, a second profile for the same location counts as a duplicate, and Google does not show duplicates on Search or Maps. Elsewhere the cost is confusion rather than a penalty, but customers ring the number they find first, and that may be the old one.

Clean up after a move or a new number

A move is when citations matter most, because the old address lives on in places you have forgotten. Work in this order:

• Edit the address on your Google Business Profile and expect to verify again. Do not create a new profile: Google says to update the existing one.
• Change the website, including the footer, the contact page and the structured data in the page code.
• Update Apple Business, Bing Places, Facebook and Yelp.
• Update your trade body, your regulator and the chamber of commerce.
• Search the web for your business name with the old address, then with the old phone number, and fix or remove each listing you find.
• Keep the old phone number forwarding to the new one for as long as you can.

Note what you reported and where, and look again a month later. Some sites take their time, and some copy from others that have not caught up yet.

A worked example. A two-van plumbing firm moves from one industrial unit to another across town. It changes its Google profile and website on moving day. Soon after, a customer drives to the old unit, because their car's navigation still has the old address, and another rings a mobile number the firm stopped using years ago, found on an old trade directory. The searches for the old address and the old number find both: the directory entry, which the firm corrects, and a data company record, which it reports. Every listing found goes on the master list, so the next move is shorter.

Why a bulk pack of hundreds of listings does nothing

Offers to submit your business to hundreds of directories for one fee arrive by email all the time. Turn them down. The reasons:

• Most of those directories have no visitors. A listing nobody sees brings nobody.
• Google's spam policies name links from low-quality directories and bookmark sites as link spam, so the links they promise are worth nothing at best.
• You end up with hundreds of listings you cannot log in to, all holding today's details and none of tomorrow's.
• When you move or change number, every one of them is wrong at once.

The emails selling these packs follow familiar patterns; our guide to SEO spam emails shows how to check what they claim.

Listing management subscriptions

A different product is the monthly subscription that pushes your details to many sites at once and keeps them in step. It can earn its fee for a chain with many locations whose hours change often. For a single location, the short list above, done by hand, is enough.

If you consider one, ask before you sign:

• Which sites it updates, by name, and which of those your customers use.
• Whether the listings stay as they are when you cancel, or go back to what they were.
• Who holds the logins, and whether you can still edit a listing yourself.
• Whether it changes your Google profile too, and who approves those changes.

If it does touch your Google profile, Google's rules for agencies require them to tell you about every change they make, and ban changing or switching off profile features without your consent.

When a paid directory is worth it

Now and then a paid listing earns its fee: a wedding directory couples really use, a trade site that sends real jobs in your area, a visitor guide that tourists in your town actually carry. The test is enquiries, not views.

Before you pay, ask the directory how many enquiries businesses like yours in your area received last year, and whether you can speak to one of them. Then add "How did you hear about us?" to your enquiry form and count. If a wedding venue gets two bookings a year from a directory that costs less than one booking, it keeps the listing. If it gets none, it stops paying.

Your website is the master copy

Directories, data companies and Google all read websites, and your own is the one source you fully control. Keep it as the master copy: the same name, address, phone number and hours as your master record, written on the contact page as text, and repeated in the structured data in the page code. Schema markup for a local business explains that part for owners.

Every website we build includes structured data and a Business Profile set up or tidied, as the prices page lists.

A check twice a year

• Search for your business name and town, and read the first two pages of results.
• Search the old address and the old phone number, if you have ever moved or changed number.
• Open each listing on your short list and compare it with the master record.
• Fix holiday hours on the listings that show hours.
• Remove services you no longer offer.

Then update the date on the master record. If a listing was wrong, check that one again sooner next time.