That Feeling When You Find Duplicate and Incorrect Citations and Listings Online
Im, not one to jump companies every 6 months I much prefer routine and stability. This, however, is not a case for many businesses, they move offices to expand or for pricing or a number of other factors some they can control and some they can not control.
Of the last two agencies I worked for the first one, once the dust had settled and I was able to look into the state of the Google my business account(s) and see what the status was I have had a massive task on my hands. The first agency I worked with was a very small agency that had several niche businesses pulling off from the central business brand, this was in itself a branding crisis let alone the agency had been hit with panda penalties and no one had any clue how to diagnose it or what a panda penalty even was :/ oh boy that's a warning sign right there.
This agencies maps listing was not registering anywhere on planet earth, the entire website collection of the main brand was sitting on an average of page 9 for the best search terms.a huge problem I encountered was that while all businesses associated with the main brand had the same address they were all incorrect and some were pointing to an old address from the previous agency owner. This was only one problem of a long list that we shall not dive to deeply into.
Now the tricky part of this was trying to edit citations, social profiles, and directory listings. No one seemed to be keeping accurate records or login information .he information that was recorded was 8/10 times incorrect or incomplete. I want to highlight that this was my first time working at a digital marketing agency and as a freelancer I maintained a strict process for record keeping and organisation. There is no room for error when you are playing with other people's businesses.
o say that this task was a nightmare before I even started the recovery process was an understatement. I gathered what i could and created a separate file storage system that could not be poisoned by the lack of quality control that I was working with. First I established a master list from the 60 or so spreadsheets that were almost all untitled, the master list contained every listing I could finf of the main business, the details are shown for each listing and I highlighted all the errors on the spreadsheet in orange.
Organisation of Marketing Materials
I then marked off as many logins and passwords that I could uncover and added them into the master list for later use. This is a massive blackhole for time and productivity that could have been avoided with structure and a solid process. Once I had exhausted all resources for completing as much as I could on the master spreadsheet I began cleaning up details that were incorrect. Again this is a time-consuming process and if you want something done right you need to do it yourself.
Once I had completed the listing cleanup I then took to contacting as many of the directories and social platforms as I could if the forgot password recovery process did not work, to try and gain control of the branded property. Despite usually having a hard time doing this I had some positive responses. I would say that the responses were out of sympathy and not because my support request was superior.
After I had completed a deep dive into link analysis and disavowed some shady links from 2007 to 2012 apparently the "golden days of seo" im told I was able to recover some traction in the SERPs. Adding new content to the service pages and no indexing a lot of useless pages (privacy, TOS, logins and others) the rankings picked up dramatically I was surprised just how well the site moved from page 9 to page 5. This I would contribute to the age of the domain being registered in 2003.
After completing as much OnPage adjustments as I could do alone, removing low-quality links and doing everything humanly possible to recover the brand listings and citations I was impressed at taking the domain from the depths of space back into the Earths orbit. The negative of all this is just as I was starting to see positive movement I decided that the agency was not the best place I could be representing and had tendered my resignation.
This was a double blow as at the exact same time that I had resigned the PPC specialist had also handed in his notice. Despite the owner throwing money at the both of us to stay the decision was final for me and it turns out the same for the PPC specialist. Im still monitoring the domain now and appalled to see the hard work dwindle away :( and the site has now declined in rankings and looks set to drift back out into the outer depths of the Milky way.
My conclusions from this are that I will reinforce my processes for organising from the start, I would not wish that clean up on any one that had followed in my shoes and took the role after me. Out of sheer professional courtesy I would want to have a neatly organised file with everything documented for teh next person to take over as if I had not skipped a beat.
I am really enjoying my new home at Be Media, I work with a very talented bunch of marketing professionals and could not of asked for a better bunch of people. Keep those citations clean.
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