How to get business search results to change contact info in one or two fell swoops?

February 27, 2012 6:55 AM

How do I change business contact information in search results/ directories?

My husband's partners must have used a service or manually entered the business address and contact information. Whenever I search for his business, the old address/number comes up. I changed our website contact info as well as as many directories I could find, but it's ridiculous.

Site results which show the erroneous contact info include:

local.yahoo
yellowpages.com
showmelocal.com
http://local.nwitimes.com
merchantcircle.com
zootoo.com
local.post-gazette.com
midwest.favecentral.com

and others. This is affecting his business because they'll call the old place and they take his customers.

What can I do to get a mass sweep of all these sort of business directory results to change the address/phone number? Is this something main yellow pages (they always bug us to sign up for advertising) could handle or do you know of any other directory places that do a "mass sweep" to get these changed?

posted by stormpooper to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I think your only option is to crank through them all manually, or hire somebody to do it. Most of those sites are created by either mass importing yellow pages type data, or they are just scraping other sites. I'd focus on the sites that come up on the first page of Google. The others probably aren't getting enough traffic to really matter.
posted by COD at 7:15 AM on February 27, 2012

There is a service called Universal Business Listings that you can submit your new information to and they will send updates to major databases that many of the top business directories use. I haven't personally used them and there are mixed reviews about it because it often takes 3-6 months for you to see results. Once the listings begin to show up, however, people are generally satisfied (you can Google for yourself to read the various reviews etc.) The service costs $75 for one year and then $59 per year after that, but since you just want to send out an address change you wouldn't need to pay for multiple years. (That's generally for agencies who are setting up business listings for clients.)

I personally have done it the manual way as COD mentions above. It's a pain in the ass, but it's free.
posted by Kimberly at 9:44 AM on February 27, 2012

I work in online marketing, and directory listings are one of the bedrock tactics of the industry. These generally have to be changed manually.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:06 AM on February 27, 2012

Response by poster: @KokuRyu would you say then that UBL is a waste?

The problem is that I'm contacting some of these places to get them changed and I am experiencing either a lack of response or technical difficulties. The ex-partner who did all this wasn't even in charge of this part of the business. My husband was but he just went ahead and did this, which means he's listed as "owner" under the directory logins, etc. Then when they broke off, my husband's business name/reputation is what they see, the calls go to the ex partner, then customers go "oh so you do it to? Ok I"ll be there".

PITA like you wouldn't believe.
posted by stormpooper at 10:48 AM on February 27, 2012