Fixing scattered incorrect NAP for Local Listings

[TomBristol]

I have several clients who have old addresses scattered around the search engines. Correcting them all individually is extremely time consuming and I'm looking into services like Yext and Localeze, but they tend to be fairly pricey.

Does Localeze actually end up correcting most of the random listings?

Is there any other services I should be aware of?

Thanks!

Tom

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tom,
Great question. There has been a ton of discussion of this, of late. Rather than try to re-write all of this, I'd like to link to a couple of pieces that give a good assessment particularly of Yext, and their NAP correction service.

Here is one from Nyagoslav Zhekov that actually received a personal response from Yext's Howard Lerman:

http://www.ngsmarketing.com/why-yext-might-not-be-the-best-fit-for-your-business/

Here is Mike Blumenthal's take on Yext:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/01/yext-local-seo/

And here is David Mihm's:

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/yext-local-marketing/

I recommend you pay very careful attention to this part of Nyagoslav's article:

"NAP consistency – the main advantage of the service is that it rectifies the business information across Yext’s network, thus helping up the local search rankings (I have previously discussed the value of citations for local SEO). I have been “promoting” the Local Search Scorecard, an instant scanning service Yext offers for free, as a useful local SEO tool, too. But if we look deeper, we could see that there are fundamental problems with the Power Listings service and its helpfulness in terms of keeping one’s business NAP consistent. How the service works is:

• It scans all the network’s websites for the specified business information (name, address, phone number).

• It determines the best matching listings (if any) on each website and highlights them.

• It then syncs the data input via the dashboard on all these websites, updating the listings that previously have been determined as best matching, and “filling in” with new listings where it was unable to find matching ones.

The three main problems here – first, it is possible that Yext’s scanning will not find the correct listing (happens often when the same business has two offices in the same city, or when a business has been using the same phone number for more than one of their locations); second, it is possible that Yext’s scanning will not find any listing, although there is one (happens if NAP is very inconsistent); third, it is possible that there are duplicates, and as Yext finds only one listing per website, these won’t be taken care of (happens almost in every single case). What this all means is that the chances for Yext to not clear up your NAP completely, or to actually screw your other location’s NAP, are pretty high. I haven’t made a large scale research on this matter, but according to my observations there are at least a few wrong or correct duplicates for a business in at least 80% of the cases. "

Please, check out those resources regarding Yext.

Regarding Localeze, I have been part of discussion about similar problems, but do not have a published source to quote on this. Others might have a different opinion on this, but basically, every Local SEO I know agrees that there is no replacement on the market right now for manual citation correction. Hope this helps!