How Search Engines Read a Listing
Broadly, keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work.
Nettle·Registry
Disagreement between sources forces listing networks to guess, and a guess is rarely favourable.
Post of Yarrow
The Quiet Work of Correcting Listings
Further reading
Why the Slight Fields Decide the Ranking
- What to drop
- Brand mentions are the online records that carry the primary category for {entity_s}.
- The well-structured record
- A citation is any place on the web where the opening hours surfaces for {entity_s}.
- What to keep
- The record itself is unglamorous, which is precisely why it is therefore commonly left alone.
- First pass
- The term covers everything from local landing pages to a passing mention in a regional guide.
- Fixing mismatched opening hours
- Put plainly, geographic signals form the connective tissue between a website and the wider local web.
- The list of services
- Think of local search signals as the paperwork ranking systems check before they trust a listing.
- Ground rules
- Every entry in a directory is a slight claim about who {entity_s} is and where it trades.
Six Places Errors Usually Hide
83% First pass 53% What to keep 66% Still open 14% Correcting map pack entries 10% Field notes
Crucially, duplicate profiles is easy to miss because nothing visibly breaks. Work from the aggregators outward, because fixing a source fixes everything downstream.