how-to guide
How to Audit Your Local Citations
A manual process for checking that your business details are consistent across the web.
Because datanephew doesn't yet have a connector for local listing platforms, auditing your citations today means checking them by hand — a bit of manual work, but worth doing periodically to keep your local search signals clean.
Steps
- List the exact, correct version of your business name, address, and phone number to use as your reference.
- Search your business name plus city in Google, and separately check major directories relevant to your industry.
- Compare each listing you find against your reference details, noting any mismatches — old addresses, wrong phone numbers, inconsistent name formatting.
- Prioritize fixing the largest and most-visited directories first, since they carry the most weight.
- Claim any unclaimed listings you find so you can correct and control them going forward.
- Recheck every few months, since directories can drift out of date on their own.
ask datanephew
Can datanephew run this audit for me automatically?
Not yet — this requires a local-listings connector datanephew doesn't have in this release, so it has to stay a manual process for now.
Can datanephew help with anything related to my local presence?
It can help with the parts of your web presence it already connects to, like your site's own search and traffic performance, while local-listing connectors are on the roadmap.