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If you would like help fixing your online business listings, please call us at 262-820-9520 or fill out this company info form. We will perform an audit of your online business listings across all the various Internet Yellow Page (IYP) directories and the major data aggregators. We will help you determine what needs to be corrected. Remember, for search engine optimization purposes, it is important to maintain accurate Name, Address, & Phone (NAP) information online!

What do you do if your business moved locations or changed it’s name in order to have that information updated on the plethora online business directories?

You used to be able to call your local phone book company to have them change your listing info.  But now, in the digital age, there are hundreds of locations where your company’s address can be listed online.  It is safe to assume that not all of those multiple listings will accurately represent your company’s current business name, business address and/or business telephone number, etc.

To help to clean up your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) info in various online business directories, I would suggest to start from ‘the top’ and work your way down.

You will want to start by correcting your business address with Localeze, Acxiom, and InfoGroup, and Factual. These are the 4 most common major business data aggregators in play these days. UBL.org also has a service where they (say that they) ‘submit’ your NAP listing to InfoGroup & Acxiom for you. [UPDATE: I do not recommend using UBL’s service, as, for me, it has only proven to produce duplicate listings across many of their ‘publisher’ websites.] Yext.com is another 3rd party that helps you to submit to other NAP sites for a large fee. [UPDATE: I highly recommend Yext’s service, as it first checks for existing listings then allows one to choose to update that existing listing before resorting to creating a new listing. We are a Certified YEXT Partner, ask us about our pricing.]

I personally like the search result functions of UBL and Yext, because they provide you with graphical idea of how your NAP listings appear (or don’t appear) on the most popular IYP-style websites / mapping apps.

From there, the theory is that, your new business address should propagate down to the ‘partner’ websites. It is said that it may take a month or a few months for the listings on the other sites to update based on this new data.

There is also a need to manually claim/update your info on some of the other more popular IYP (Internet Yellow Page) websites.  I have talked with tech support from some of these websites where one technician told me that, yes, they do use the database from Acxiom for their business listings, however the last time they actually synchronized / updated from that database was a year ago.

A pitfall that I have found in relying solely on the ‘major data aggregators (listed above) is that they will most likely not handle duplicate listings on their partner websites.

For example, I have clients where I have found 3 or 5 or more business listings on the same IYP website, each with slightly different NAP info or business name variations. (On sites such as: citysearch.com, superpages.com, local.com, etc.)  I often feel that their end goal is to have the largest business listing database, rather than the most accurate database. 😉

In this case you will need to contact tech support of those websites individually to request that they either delete and/or merge duplicate listings.  What I have done in these situations is… I would provide a link to each of the duplicate listings and then also show the support staff which listing is the proper/preferred listing.

Good luck in your NAP uniformity projects! If you need help with this, please contact us now to get started.

If you would like help fixing your online business listings, please call us at 262-820-9520 or fill out this company data form. We will perform a free audit of your online business listings across all the various Internet Yellow Page (IYP) directories and the major data aggregators. We will help you determine what needs to be corrected. Remember, for search engine optimization purposes, it is important to maintain accurate Name, Address, & Phone (NAP) information online!

9 thoughts on “How to Change a Business Address or Name in Online Directory Listings”

  1. Hi,
    This has been a mild nightmare for me. I moved my practice last year. I have contacted Goggle and thought the problem was resolved – moving from 315 Second Street So., Kirkland, Wa., 98033 to new location – 150 Lake Street So., Suite 201, Kirkland, Wa. 98033 was resolved. They simply added the new address, but did not delete the old one. Now the new address is completely deleted and the old address remains!!!

    I’m interested to know what you can do. Thank you,
    Sincerely,
    Sandra

  2. Very helpful article, thank you. We sold our business, and I need to close all the old listings (they are a MESS, multiple phone numbers, duplicates). I will be a part of the new company that will be opening at the same address (new name, website..). We are of course just a Small business. What is the best approach to shut down old listings before opening the new? THank you so much!

    • Hi Ali,

      Is the old business moving to a different location? Are they taking the name/phone number with it? Will the new owners want to correct the NAP info of the business they purchased or close the listings down completely? Your strategy might depend on such factors.

      If the business is the “Dave’s … Auto…” in your comment URL… you should consider the multiple G+ Local listings that exist.

      I can foresee a larger mess if you try to create listings for a new company with only 1 of the 3 N.A.P. factors being different from the old company (for example, only changing the name, but keeping the same address and phone number).

      1. Company Name
      2. Address of Business
      3. Phone Number

      For many IYP (internet yellow page) websites they require 2 of these factors to be unique in order to have a new listing created.

      In any case, you would want to contact Localeze, Acxiom, and InfoGroup (and perhaps D&B) to start with, as they are the larger business data aggregators these days. They have functions to mark a business as ‘closed’.

      From there you could continue to manually contact each of the most popular IYP websites that show up on the first few pages of a Google search for our company’s NAP to request listing removals. (Such as: Yelp, Facebook, Yellowbook, Merchant Circle, Whitepages, Angieslist, Yahoo Local, etc.)

      You could also fill out our NAP form and request a quote for us to help you with this. (Link in article.)

      • Thank you for your response. The business phone number and name will be different, same address. What would happen if I left the old listings, and just created new ones?

        • You can leave the old listings alone if you choose, but they could, theoretically, compete for search engine exposure with your new listings.

          You could start fresh with new listings in each of the major aggregators and IYP sites (using Yext for IYP distro would be a good start.) We have done this for clients in the past, for new businesses. That way you can take your time to request the old listings to be closed (or the new owner of the old business can attempt to change the listings.)

          In either case, any listings that have been previously claimed or verified by PIN (like Google/Yahoo/Bing local listings) should be manually closed, as it would be difficult for the new owner to do so without usernames/passwords for the accounts that claimed the listings.

          Let me know if you would like our help with any of this.

  3. Great hints. I have a lot of campaigns and any suggestions to help streamline them is appreciated

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