The citation cleanup that took a detour

The citation cleanup that took a detour

Meet a three-van plumbing outfit in Phoenix. Inconsistent address across forty directories — three different suite numbers floating around the web since a 2019 office move.

We almost reached for BrightLocal's Citation Builder, the obvious choice. Fast, cheap per listing. But this wasn't a build problem. It was a cleanup problem — old wrong data, not missing data. BrightLocal adds. It doesn't reliably hunt down and fix what's already wrong.

So we ran Whitespark's Citation Audit instead. It surfaced 22 listings with the dead suite number, each with a direct link to claim or correct.

Three weeks of manual correction. Tedious, unglamorous.

The map pack didn't move on day one. It moved on day forty — they jumped from the bottom of the local finder into the 3-pack for "water heater repair," calls up from roughly 30 to 71 a month.

The lesson: for building new citations, a bulk tool wins on speed. For fixing wrong ones already indexed, you need an audit tool that finds the bad data first — adding correct listings on top of wrong ones just confuses Google further.