Your Phone Number, Three Different Ways

Search your own business name. Now open the listings one by one and actually read them.

There’s your Google profile, your Yell page, that Facebook page, the industry directory you signed up to years ago and forgot. Read the address on each. Read the phone number. Read the business name, exactly as it’s written.

Chances are they don’t all match. The unit number changed when you moved and one listing never caught up. The number is a mobile on two of them and the landline on the rest. One says “Ltd”, one doesn’t. To you they’re obviously the same business. To Google, they’re three businesses, and it isn’t sure which one is real — so it trusts all of them a little less.

Those listings have a name: citations. And the consistency of the details across them is one of the quiet things that decides whether you make the map pack — that box of three businesses sitting above everything when someone searches your trade in your town.

I wrote a piece this week about what citations actually are, why the “submit to 500 directories” services and the £400-a-month subscription both miss the point, and what really moves the needle — a focused set of about twenty listings, all carrying the same details, kept live. It’s the unglamorous foundation work I do in the first few weeks for every client, before I write a word of content. Nobody brags about tidying up their Yell listing. It just quietly works.

Read it here → What Are Local Citations, and Why Yours Are Probably a Mess

Tony Cooper We Build Stores

tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk 07963 242210

P.S. If you want to know how scrambled your own listings are before you do anything about it, reply with your business name and I’ll run a citation gap-check — where you’re listed, where you’re missing, and where your details don’t match. There’s no charge for the check — it usually takes me a few minutes, and it’s normally the part that shows you exactly how much you’ve been leaving on the table.