Someone drives to your Coburg workshop on a Saturday morning because a directory nobody in the business has opened since 2019 says you trade from nine. You stopped opening Saturdays two years ago. They do not ring to check. They go somewhere else, and you never hear about it.
Search engines and AI systems both weigh how well your details agree across the web. When two sources contradict each other, that reads as uncertainty about a basic fact. A system that is uncertain tends to leave a business out of the answer rather than risk naming it wrongly. The fix costs nothing and takes about an afternoon. It is the cheapest job in local search and the one most businesses have never done.
The cost is not abstract. It is a customer at a closed door, and calls that never come.
Google’s own Business Profile help names three things behind local results: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you cannot change. Prominence is how well known and trusted the business looks across the web, and agreement between sources feeds directly into it.
What has changed is the shape of the answer. A page of ten blue links could carry a wrong phone number and a right one, and the customer sorted it out. An AI answer names one business and gives one number. There is no second opinion in the result. A system holding two versions of your number has a reason to pick someone whose details are not in dispute.
Five, and only five, need to match character for character.
The name. One version, everywhere. Not the legal entity in one place and the shopfront name in another. Australian businesses have an extra wrinkle. Since 31 October 2025, ABN Lookup shows only an entity’s legal name and business names registered with ASIC. Old unregistered trading names are gone. If customers know you by a name that was never registered, anyone checking ABN Lookup cannot confirm you exist.
The address. Unit or Suite or Shop. St or Street. Whether the level number is on its own line. These look like nothing and they are the most common mismatch. Every platform formats them differently, and someone types them fresh each time.
The phone number. One number. If you run a mobile and a landline, pick the one you answer and use it on every listing. A tracking number on some listings and the real number on others is the version of this that costs the most.
The hours. Including public holidays. Victoria has holidays other states do not, and a national directory will happily show you as open on Melbourne Cup Day.
The category. The primary category decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all. A workshop listed as “car dealer” is competing in the wrong race before anything else is considered.
More places than most owners expect, and some of them nobody in the business created.
| Source | Who controls it | How you correct it | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | You, once verified | Edit directly in the profile | Edits are reviewed before they appear, and some are rejected |
| Apple Maps and Siri | You, once claimed | Apple’s own business listing tool | The tool has been renamed more than once, so search for it rather than bookmarking it |
| Bing Places | You, once claimed | Claim it, or import from Google Business Profile | Feeds Microsoft Copilot as well as Bing |
| Yellow Pages and True Local | You, once claimed. Both run by Thryv Australia | Claim the listing and edit the fields | Old listings often predate your claim and hold old details |
| Industry platforms such as hipages, Oneflare or HealthEngine | You, through your account | Edit in the account | Easy to forget, because the account is managed by whoever handles leads |
| ABN Lookup and the ASIC business names register | You, through the ABR and ASIC | Update the ABN record and register the name | Legal name and registered business names only, since 31 October 2025 |
| Facebook and Instagram | You, as page admin | Page settings | Often set up years ago by someone who has left |
| Listings you never created | Nobody, until you claim them | Claim, or suggest an edit | This is where the 2019 opening hours usually live |
You do not need to chase all of them. Fix the first three, plus the industry platform your customers use. The rest of the web tends to follow, because the smaller directories copy the big ones.
This is the one that does real damage, and Google is direct about it. You can have only one Business Profile per business. Multiple profiles for the same business are against Google’s policies, and a profile treated as a duplicate will not show on Search or Maps at all.
Google names three ways a profile gets flagged as a duplicate. A verified profile already exists for the business. Several profiles share one address. Or several profiles exist for the same business, offering different services. That last one catches people out. If you run three services, they belong on one profile as services, not on three profiles.
If your business relocates, do not create a new Business Profile for the new address. Update the existing one. That is Google’s own instruction, and the cost of ignoring it is a profile that shows nowhere.
Sorting one out depends on who holds it. Say a verified profile for your business is owned by someone else, a former staff member or an old agency. You request access, and the current owner has three days to respond. If they approve, you take over. If they deny, you can appeal, or suggest an edit in Google Maps. If nobody responds within three days, you may get the option to claim it, though Google notes that option is not always available.
If you created the duplicate yourself, you can remove it without touching your verified listing. Removing it deletes all its content and unlinks its managers, so check twice which one you are deleting. If both need to survive as one, you request a merge by reporting a suggestion in Google Maps. Merges are reviewed rather than automatic, and the profiles have to represent the same business with the same details. When two profiles merge, the reviews are combined, but the replies you wrote to those reviews may be lost.
Sharing an address does not mean sharing a profile. Google allows separate Business Profiles for two businesses at one address if they are genuinely distinct, with different names and clearly visible differences in signage. That covers serviced offices, allied health suites and individual practitioners in a shared clinic. If Google has wrongly merged two real businesses, you can appeal. Where both serve customers at the same location, you will be asked for evidence of permanent signage showing both names. Photograph the signage before you lodge the appeal, not after.
Half an hour, a notepad and a browser.
Write the five facts down first. Name, address, phone, hours, category, exactly as they should appear. Everything else is comparison against this one page.
Search your business name with your suburb. Go three pages deep, not one. The listings causing trouble are never on page one.
Search your phone number in quote marks. This finds listings that use a different spelling of your name, which is exactly the set a name search misses.
Search your old address and your old phone number. If you have moved or changed numbers in the last five years, this is usually where the worst of it is.
Check ABN Lookup. Confirm the legal name and any registered business name are what you expect, and that the ABN is still active.
Compare your Google Business Profile last. Character by character against your written list. Do the hours including public holidays, and check the primary category rather than assuming it.
Keep the list. This becomes a ten-minute job every time something changes, but only if the master version is written down somewhere other than in someone’s head.
A move, a rebrand, a new number or a change of hours is the moment this breaks, and the order matters. Update the Google Business Profile first, then Apple and Bing, then your industry platform, then everything else. That order gets the sources the smaller directories copy from right before they copy.
Two things get forgotten every time. The first is the old phone number. Divert it rather than disconnecting it, and leave the diversion running for a year. Listings you have not found yet are still sending people to it. A disconnected number turns a found listing into a lost customer. A diverted one turns it into a call.
The second is the ABN record. The Australian Business Register requires you to update your ABN details within 28 days of them changing, or of the business ceasing to operate. That is not a marketing task and it is not optional. It belongs on the same list because it is the record other people check to confirm you are real.
If you would rather someone else found every wrong copy and fixed them in the right order, that is part of what CJ Digital’s Google Business Profile work covers. Get in touch and we will tell you what is out there before you decide.
Less than it used to for exact matching, and more than you would think for the overall picture. One listing writing “Ste 4” where the rest say “Suite 4” is unlikely to break anything on its own. Twenty listings with six variations between them is a different problem. There is no longer an obvious correct version for anything to agree with.
Usually you would rather claim it than remove it. A claimed listing becomes another correct copy of your details. Removal is the right call when the listing shows an address you have never traded from. In Google Maps that is done through the suggest an edit option on the listing itself.
It buys speed rather than something you cannot do yourself, and the value depends on how many listings exist. The catch worth knowing is that some of these services rent the listing rather than fixing it. The corrections can revert if you stop paying. Ask that question before you sign anything.
Google supports this. You set the profile up as a service area business, hide the street address, and still declare the areas you serve. The consistency job does not change. The suburb, the phone number, the name and the hours still have to agree everywhere, and the hidden address still has to be right in the profile itself.
There is no published timeframe, and edits to Google Business Profiles are reviewed rather than applied instantly. Some appear within hours and some sit for days. Edits suggested on listings you do not own can be rejected without much explanation. Make the change, note the date, and check back in a week rather than resubmitting.
