Why three lines of contact details decide your visibility
A search engine does not know a priori that the « Martin Plumbing » listing in a directory and the website martin-plumbing.com describe the same business. It infers it, by cross-checking information. The three that serve as the key are the name, the address and the phone number.
When those three agree everywhere, each mention reinforces the same entity, and authority adds up. When they diverge, the engine has to arbitrate between two possible entities, or conclude that two exist. Either way, your signal splits instead of adding up.
The most frequent cases are not gross errors. They are variations: a number written with the international dialling code here and without it there, « Street » against « St. », an old address left in a directory after a move, an old number that still forwards.
The method, in four steps
1. Choose the reference spelling. Just one, written down in a document you keep. The name exactly as it appears on your registration document, the address in the form used by the postal service, the number in a single format. That document becomes the source of truth: every future mention follows it.
2. Inventory the existing mentions. Search your phone number in quotes, then your business name, then your address. The results give you the list of places where you exist, including the ones you forgot: trade directories, review platforms, old listings created by a supplier.
3. Fix in order of weight. Not all sources are equal. Start with your business listing, then your website, then the two or three most visible directories in your trade. The rest can wait.
4. Mark it up on the website. Displaying the address is not enough: it has to be declared as structured data, in a block naming the street, the postcode, the town and the phone number. That is what turns information a human can read into information a machine can use.
Three traps that undo the work
- The number shown as an image. An old trick against harvesting bots. An engine does not read the image, and neither does an AI: your phone number does not exist for them. Show it as text, in a clickable
tel:link. - Markup that contradicts the page. A structured data block copied from a template, left with the example address, while the page shows the real one. That is worse than no markup at all: the two sources contradict each other, and the one the machine reads first is the wrong one.
- A unique call-tracking number. Using a different number on each channel to measure where calls come from mechanically breaks consistency. If you want it, keep the main number everywhere it is indexed and reserve tracking numbers for campaigns that are not crawled.
The rest of the local mechanics, categories, area and reviews, is covered by the local SEO guide and by the article on collecting reviews.
The case of moving premises and changing name
This is the moment consistency breaks at once, and where the general method is no longer enough. Two situations, two different treatments.
Moving premises. The classic error is to change the address everywhere on the day of the move, including on the business listing. The engine then sees a business changing position, which is exactly what fraudsters do when they move a listing into a more profitable area. The recommended treatment is to edit the existing listing rather than create a new one, in a single step, and update the website the same day. Creating a second listing for the new address produces two competing entities, and you lose the age and the reviews of the first.
Changing name. This is trickier because the name is the primary matching key. Directories carrying the old name will keep describing an entity nothing connects to you any more. The fix runs in the reverse order of the usual method: first the sources carrying the old name, one by one, then your website.
In both cases, keep a written record of the change date. Six months later, when you still find an outdated mention, you will know whether it is your own oversight or a directory that never propagated it.
And do not close the old phone number overnight. As long as it appears on indexed material, better that it forwards to the new one than rings into the void.
What our audit measures
The business listing and local SEO category holds 8 checks, and several bear exactly on this. The audit looks at whether business markup is present, whether the declared address is complete, whether the phone number is clickable, whether opening hours are declared, and above all it compares the markup with the visible text of the page. Three gaps are named when they appear: a marked-up phone number appearing nowhere on the page, a marked-up postcode matching none of those shown, a marked-up town missing from the page text.
That category only appears for websites presenting themselves as a business or a local service. It is triggered by a bundle of physical signals, not by a single word in the text: an address in the legal notice is not enough, otherwise every registered company would be treated as a shop.
What the audit does not do: it consults no external directory. It compares what your website declares with what your website shows. Consistency with third-party directories is checked by hand, with the method above.