Moving Locations and NAP

[Vspeed]

Hello,

I am the new IT guy for a business that is moving. They have a ton of old NAP stuff for like 3 offices that they are no longer at and to be honest, the entire NAP is just a total chaotic mess. They did not keep a record of the accounts used to make the listings or anything of the sort.

Now they want me to fix it all up. Does anyone have any suggestions on techniques for doing this? Is there a way to get these out of date listings closed or do I just simply make all new ones that are correct? Or is there something I am not thinking of?

Thanks.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Create new ones then report the old ones as "moved location/no longer in business" (whichever option is available)

then wait and hope things get slowly updated

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Sounds like a big project. It's normally best to update current listings. I think you'll find these posts to be helpful, while bearing in mind that each platform has its own policies and options:

http://www.joyannehawkins.com/the-proper-way-to-deal-with-duplicates-in-google-my-business/

http://www.localsearchforum.com/moving-name-changes/36969-moving-business-best-practices.html

Hope these help!

[Eric_Rohrback]

Creating new locations will actually create more work for you. Do like Miriam said and update the current listings. If you create new listings, you still have the issue of cleaning up the old ones which could cause ranking problems as you battle yourself to tell Google which information is correct.

LocalSEOGuide created a cool tool (NAP Hunter) to help find mismatched citation sources. Download that chrome extension and plug in both your current address, and past variations. Pull all that information into an Excel file, and then you'll be able to run a pretty good gap analysis to see what you need to try and update. Not all sites will allow you to update, and old unstructured citations like news articles, blog posts, etc would fall into that category. Local directories will be a little easier, but again there are sites that lock you out from editing unless you pay.

Don't wait & pray, be proactive to get these updated. Citation work can either be a large project or can be outsourced to different teams/products (Moz, Yext, Whitespark, or other consultants/contractors). It also sounds like they've manually claimed a few sites prior to you coming on, so you'd need to spend some time working with each site's support team to try and get access/reset the account. Without that you won't be able to update the business information.