What is a duplicate business listing?

It is as straightforward as it sounds. Somehow in the course of updating content online, you or someone else created another source of information on your business. Most often entirely by mistake, you may have created another page forgetting you had already done so. Or someone meaning well could have included information on your business in a guide or online collection. Simple as that, you now have a duplicate business listing. 

Why you want to avoid duplicate business listings

Duplicate listings cause a lot of confusion. It can confuse potential customers trying to find the most accurate and updated information on your business. If they see duplicate listings and aren’t sure which one is correct, it may result in lost website traffic and revenue for you. 

It can also cause existing customers to be uncertain on which listing to post their review of your business. If there are duplicates, then the good and the bad reviews might be split leaving lopsided impressions of your services. 

Beyond customers, it also confuses the search engines that take SEO and other listing factors into consideration. This could result in your actual business listing ranking poorly or even not being displayed at all due to confusion between duplicate listings. 

How can you correct duplicate business listings

To help combat duplicate listings, you can monitor the pages associated with your business yourself. By doing periodic checks on search engines, you can catch duplicate listings before they have the chance to do too much harm. If you find one, Google and other search engines make it easy to flag a listing as “duplicate” and their internal teams will go through and verify and handle the removal of any duplicates. 

The process of monitoring and removing duplicate listings can be time consuming and sometimes frustrating – just because you’ve removed one duplicate doesn’t mean you don’t have to continue monitoring for new ones. Luckily, Direct Local can help you streamline the process of monitoring and removing duplicate business listings. 

Working with Direct Local minimizes the amount of time you need to spend worrying about duplicate listings, and let’s you spend your time focusing on other aspects of your business online. To learn how much easier they make the process, reach out to schedule a consultation today.