Duplicates, duplicates, duplicates! If you own a business, chances are somewhere out there a duplicate listing of your business exists. That doesn’t mean that it is your fault; in fact, you could have done everything right.
Unfortunately, sometimes life gives you lemons (that’s when I get the tequila, I mean make lemonade…) and you have to clean up the mess.
If you're seeing double, don’t worry! We’re here to tell you all about what a duplicate listing is and how to get them removed, without the urge of reaching for the aspirin.
Before we get into the finer details of duplicates, let’s define exactly what we are talking about here. If a local business has more than one listing on any given directory, such as Yelp, Yellowpages, etc., that is considered a duplicate. Seems pretty simple, right? You wouldn’t put the same recipe in a cookbook twice, so why list your business in the same directory twice?
So, how do these duplicates come to be? There are a number of different ways these duplicates appear, and it is difficult to say who the actual culprit is with 100% certainty. Typically, we can chalk it up to one of three scenarios:
We know that duplicates are a bad thing, but why? Again, not a black-and-white answer; however, Google’s Business Guidelines make it very clear that you should not create more than one listing for each of your business locations.
There may be some exceptions to this rule, such as multi-practitioner medical practices, but typically, you will still need a suite number to create separate listings.
There are a number of things that can happen when you have duplicate listings. Let’s take a look at those now.
There are a couple of different approaches we can take here, but keep in mind we may need to use more than one strategy. There are plenty of third-party services that promise to update and add your business to hundreds of different directories. Be careful when evaluating third-party services as some of these systems are outdated and even worse, they charge you an arm and a leg, each month!
So, who can we trust? Moz Local offers a great local listing service at an affordable yearly rate. They help you find duplicates of your business and even allow you to add alternative names to your duplicate search.
This is especially helpful if you may have purchased a business and changed names. The only other way to effectively find all of your duplicates is to simply search Google. Try searching for your company's address, phone number, name, etc. to get the full gambit of potential duplicates.
Need some help getting started? Stay tuned for the next blog in this series, where we will walk you through the process of getting these duplicates deleted on a few different directories!