Your business name, address, and phone number should match exactly across your website and your Google Business Profile. When they differ, by an old suite number, a call-tracking number, or "Co." versus "Company", search engines become less certain the listings describe the same business. Second Opinion weights this check at 90 out of 100, and fixing it is an afternoon of tedious work with no ongoing cost.
This is the thing that quietly undermines your Google profile.
Your business name, address, and phone number need to say the same thing everywhere they appear. When they don't, search engines become uncertain whether they are looking at one business.. or two similar ones.
This uncertainty costs you. You rank lower on search engines, because in essence.. you're competing with yourself.
How this happens
Nobody sets out to publish three versions of their phone number. It happens like this:
- You ran an ad with a call-tracking number, and it's still sitting on the contact page.
- You moved, and the old suite number is still in the footer.
- Your Google profile says "Ferguson & Sons Co." and your website says "Ferguson and Sons Company."
- Someone built a new site and typed the address from memory.
Every one of those things is surprisingly hard to spot. After all, you know that your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, and your website all represent the same business.
A machine doesn't.
What we check
Second Opinion compares the name, phone, and street identity on your website against your public Google profile, and flags a conflict only where the evidence is real.
We don't flag formatting for its own sake. A missing "Suite 4" matters. A hyphen in a phone number doesn't.
It's tedious.. but it stays fixed. That's a good trade.
While you're in there: the tap-to-call test
Open your own site on your phone and tap the phone number. If nothing happens, it's typed as text instead of a link, and every mobile visitor who wanted to call you had to copy it out by hand.
Some of them didn't.
We report that one, but it doesn't affect your score. It isn't a ranking issue.
It's just money on the floor.
The fix
An afternoon for the first three steps. The fourth is a list that you can chip away at over time.
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Write down the one correct version
Before you change anything, decide what correct is. Ten minutes here prevents the most common version of this mistake, which is carefully fixing four places to four slightly different answers.
Open a blank note and write three lines. These are the three fields the check actually compares.
- The business name, exactly as it appears on your paperwork or your sign. Pick one. "Ferguson & Sons Co." and "Ferguson and Sons Company" are two different businesses to a machine.
- The street address, including the suite number if you have one. Use the format the post office uses.
- One phone number, the one you want ringing when a stranger calls.
If a call-tracking number lives anywhere, decide its fate now. If it stays, it goes on exactly one page and never on your Google profile.
You can read all three clear lines off of one note, and not one of them is a guess.
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Fix your website
If you have a website, it likely serves as the hub of all of your digital operations, which makes it the highest leverage fix.
Four places, in this order. The last one catches what the first three miss.
- The footer. It's on every page, so one stale number there is wrong on every page you have.
- The contact page.
- The header or top bar, if the number appears there.
- Everywhere else. Open each main page and use find-on-page (Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac) to search the last four digits of the old number, the street address, and the business name.
If your site was built from a template, the details may be typed into each page rather than pulled from one setting.
That's why the fourth step matters more than it sounds.
Every page that shows any of the three details now matches the note.
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Check your Google Business Profile
Sign in with the Google account that manages the business, then search your business name. If you're the owner, the edit controls open directly in the results.
Not seeing them? Try a Chrome window, or sign that browser into the account that actually owns the listing.. it's usually the wrong account rather than a missing permission.
Change all three to match the note exactly. Character for character, suite number included. "Close enough" won't cut it here.. imprecise data is the problem you're here to fix.
Google may ask you to re-verify the business after a name or address change. That is routine.. not a penalty, and it is worth doing.
If the profile itself is thin beyond these three fields, the profile guide covers the rest of it.
Your profile and your contact page read the same, line for line.
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Edit the directories (Yelp, BBB, etc...) that already list you
This is the tedious step, so do it in the order that pays rather than alphabetically.
First, find them: search Google for your phone number in quotation marks, then your business name in quotation marks. What comes back is the list of places that already have your business listed.
Most businesses find somewhere between five and twenty. Work them in this order:
- Anything that sends you actual calls. You already know which ones those are.
- Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, and Facebook. A lot of smaller directories copy from these four.
- Your trade association and chamber of commerce. Usually easy, usually forgotten, usually trusted.
- Everything else, whenever you feel like it.
You don't have to fix all of them, and you don't have to fix them today. The ones nobody visits still count for a little, but not enough to lose sleep over.
You could hire a VA to handle the remaining list without breaking the bank.
The handful of listings that actually send you calls all match the note, and you have a written list of whatever remains.