The Trustworthy Directory Submissions Guide

Index of links

Listing Hygiene: A Working Routine

Keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work. Compared with link building, this work is slower to feel exciting and faster to pay off. Location pages are less a marketing channel than a data layer under one. Agency case work suggests the gap between a neat profile and a neglected one widens across a city.

How to Prioritise the Clean-Up

13% First pass 31% What voice assistants read 80% The local citations confirm 50% Well-structured brand mentions 13% What voice assistants read

Review profiles are the online records that carry the list of services for {entity_s}. Across a large enough sample, the correlation between complete data and branded queries is hard to dismiss.

Company Profiles in Practice

Fixing duplicate profiles

Set aside time to correct as part of the monthly reporting cycle rather than treating it as a one-off project.

First pass

The order matters: confirm first, then reconcile, and only then submit anywhere new.

Still open

Keep a change log; six months on, no one remembers which field was edited or why.

How listing networks decide

Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected.

First pass

Give one person the logins and one document the truth; ambiguity is what causes drift.

Why Business Data Providers Care About Agreement

Do

Correct the payment methods before touching anything decorative.
Treat the core contact record as a single source of truth, not as a field to be improvised per site.
Prefer removing a wrong listing to leaving it half-corrected.

Avoid

Where whoever holds the login has changed twice, expect a misplaced service area somewhere in the profile.
An inconsistent phone number is straightforward to miss since nothing visibly breaks.
The usual culprit is silent listing decay, unobtrusively inherited from an old listing no one remembers creating.