Let’s start with a quick definition.
When a local business has more than one listing for a single physical location in an online directory, these other listings are considered duplicates.
A variety of negative outcomes can arise from the presence of duplicate listings, detracting from your local business’s ability to rank well and win members.
The Google My Business Review Policies speak in very plain language about the number of listings your business can have: Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
In most cases, failure to comply with the above rule may result in any or all of the following:
- Not knowing which of your listings will outrank the others. You may end up with a highly visible listing with an outdated address, a wrong phone number or other issues showing up for your searches instead of your approved, authoritative listing. New members may be misdirected by the bad data, causing you to lose business. No one wants to try and urgently find an ATM and discover nothing at that location!
- Your review equity may be split up amongst the different listings. Instead of having a single profile for a branch with 20 great reviews, you may have one listing with five reviews and another with 15. If the listing with only five reviews is the one that shows up, the great reputation you are building will be invisible to your potential members.
- Major search engines like Google will not know which of your listings to trust, whether within their own index or within other indexes they rely on for data. You always want to send a single, clear signal about each credit union branch to the search engines from each place it is listed.
- Because of the way that data is fed from one local business index to another on the Internet, even one duplicate listing with bad data can be replicated across multiple platforms. Old listings with incorrect information can end up creating new listings with duplicated errors.
Management of a single listing on a variety of platforms can be challenging enough. If your business needs to update information, you may end up editing the wrong listings if they are duplicates. Your changes may never appear live because you are not editing the listing the search engine or index has decided is most authoritative for your business.
Duplicate listings are not always your fault – in fact, most of the time they aren’t! Very often, duplicates arise out of automated activity on the part of search engines or directories. For example, Facebook added thousands and thousands of business listings in this way. Regardless of how duplicate listings are created, it is always a best practice to try to get them merged or removed.
