Local Search Auditing Best Practice?

[Sarah]

When requesting old/incorrect information from a client for Local Search auditing and clean-up, how far back should we go? 5 years? 10 years? Is it imperative that we clean-up old/incorrect listings on ALL citation sites regardless of how "authoritative" the site is?

If a thread already exists with this info, please let me know and I'll see my way there

Thanks in advance!

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Sarah, I suggest asking broadly at first, as in "Please tell me all the names, addresses, and phone numbers you've used for your business." If you receive more than a couple of each, and especially if you get the sense your client has more NAP skeletons in the closet and might not remember them all, do a little digging to see what else you find. Then ask the client to confirm that the new info you uncovered is in fact for his/her business, and ask whether there's even more. Consider using NAP Hunter Lite (or doing hand-to-hand Google-fu).

Trust, but verify.

As to the number of listings to look at: don't bother with all of them. For any given client, rarely are there more than about 30 listings (give or take 15) that matter in any discernible way. If you're cleaning up more than 50, I would say you're at or past the point of diminishing return. (There may still be value in having listings on those sites, but not having the correct info on them isn't a Code Blue.)