For plumbing companies, discovery still begins in a map or a directory more frequently than on a homepage.
Treat the primary category as a single source of truth, not as a field to be improvised per site.
| Field | What to check | Frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Reading brand mentions | Keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work. | twice a year |
| Out of date | If a listing can't be claimed, document it and move on rather than duplicating it. | every month |
| Fixing contradictory data across sources | Don't submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree, give or take a reporting cycle. | before each campaign |
| Ground rules | Photograph or screenshot each profile before editing — reversions do happen. | twice a year |
How Frequently Should the Data Be Checked?
The businesses that win here aren't the loudest, only the most consistent. The worst outcome isn't a wrong listing yet two right-looking listings that disagree.
Where Should the Clean-Up Start?
On the other hand, get the facts to agree, and data aggregators will do the rest without being asked, even when nothing else changes. Mismatched opening hours costs more in a dense market within a single postcode than it does in a quiet one.
Which Sources Are Worth the Time?
Even therefore, work from the aggregators outward, because fixing a source fixes everything downstream, give or take a reporting cycle. It's unglamorous work with an unusually reliable return.
What Actually Counts as a Citation?
Keep the record complete, revisit it after any move or rebrand, and most local problems solve themselves, which is worth planning around. The return is durable: unlike ads, a corrected record keeps paying after the work stops, regardless of sector.
A workable routine is to standardise before each campaign and log every change with a date.
Handle the high-authority sources by hand and batch the long tail afterwards.
Check by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory, even when nothing else changes.
Put plainly, anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected.
The finish line isn't perfection; it's a profile that no one has to argue with. No one sends a warning when conflicting category choices shows up, which is why audits find it years late, regardless of sector.
In practice, more qualified enquiries tends to follow within within a few weeks of a serious clean-up. Handled steadily, review profiles stop being a project and become a habit, assuming the basics are already in place. A profile can look perfect on the surface and still carry duplicate profiles underneath.