Better to get new phone # for purchased practice?

[Tom Bristol]

Our client purchased a dental practice that has a confused NAP scattered across the net from old doctors and old business name's at that address and phone. Some of these NAPs have the same phone and a slightly different street address 5218 E Fowler instead of 5208, etc.

All in all, to clean up the citation profile and to mark all of these closed is going to be a ton of work and might not fully handle it.

The client just purchased their practice and renamed and re-branded it under a completely different name. The problem is that kept the old phone #. As he's just starting out his got a limited number of citations, and we could fix them.

I'm going to be recommending that they get a different phone # and promote that as their NAP instead.

Do you see any downsides to this? Any additional thoughts on the matter?

Thanks!
Tom

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Tom,

Sounds like a big clean up job no matter how you cut it. Whitespark does a great job of citation cleanup if you need help.

But which way to go is hard to say without deeper research. It would take someone analyzing it all and weighing it all out. Hard to say with just the generic details. I would not want to steer you wrong.

 

[Tom Bristol]

Thanks Linda - yeah, it's going to be a lot of work either way. I think changing their phone will probably be the cleanest. They have a slightly different address now too, so in Google's eye's hopefully they'll be a new entity.

I'll go ahead and mark the others closed, but - fingers crossed - they won't mess with his listing.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[Janell H]

I ran into this same problem many times. Even thought it is time consuming it will be worth it to get the NAP consistent across the Internet.

I've heard Yext is a good service. Have you used any citation clean-up services so you don't have to do it manually?

 

[Broland]

Getting a new phone number sounds like it will be your best option. I would keep the old phone number of course and forward it to the new one for anyone who calls it. If you get the new phone number, it will be just like starting from scratch with a new entity. The advantage of updating all the existing listings would be that you would have the benefits of aged listings on your side, but that doesn't seem to out weigh the time and/or money needed in the case based on what you described.

As far as the clean-up or new creation process, I would highly recommend avoiding yext - in situations of any NAP confusion their service almost always seems to make things worse.

At DirectoryBug we have the most accurate and effective scan tool for clean-up and finding existing listings (Beta available to the public soon). I'm happy to give members of this forum a free test run in hopes of receiving their valuable feedback.

 

[Tyson Downs]

Hey Broland, I'm interested in a test run of the software. Interesting to see what it turns up. I have a dentist that is going through a re-branding (two actually) and I know their NAP is completely messed up.

 

[Tom Bristol]

Thanks - we ended up getting a new phone number and using that. Still a lot of work ahead, though.

I'd be interested in a beta of the DirectoryBug too.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[Adam Steele]

Yah, probably a good idea to just start fresh if the opportunity is available. Course, the downside is you may decide to use a fresh listing, losing the listing history of the previous one. Starting fresh takes time too, and not only time to create citations, but the wait time for Google to trust your new listing. I would suggest getting those new citations sorted before you go ahead and create the listing. I would, and it seems you already are, recommend cleaning that mess up, atleast on the important directories so that old customers or general searchers aren't at a loss when they find old stuff.

Nothing is going to be better than a little elbow grease, some search operators and time. No tool, no fancy nothing. Check out Darren's slidedeck here for some good search operators.

Good luck!

 

[Tom Bristol]

Thanks Adam that slidedeck is exactly what I've been looking for. Very much appreciated!

 

[jvaquino]

Start with new NAP. Cleaning all the mess will take you forever especially for those local directory owners/webmasters which unresponsive to your request.

There is good service that can help you like Whitespark, which offers Citation Audit and cleanup service for $700-$2400. I dunno if the price is still the same because it seems like they updated the page https://www.whitespark.ca/citation-audit-and-cleanup-service