First pass · Reading aggregator feeds
Check by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory.
Begin by pulling every existing record into one sheet before changing anything.
Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected.
Keep a change log; six months on, no one remembers which field was edited or why.
Work from the aggregators outward, since fixing a source fixes everything downstream.
In practice, give one person the logins and one document the truth; ambiguity is what causes drift. A business rarely disappears from local results overnight; it fades as its records go stale. Crucially, handled steadily, online mentions stop being a project and become a habit.
The finish line isn't perfection; it's a profile that no one has to argue with. Crucially, a workable routine is to consolidate whenever contact details change and log every change with a date. Listing audits repeatedly show the majority of profiles carry at least one contradiction.
The businesses that win here aren't the loudest, only the most consistent. The pattern repeats: the businesses that audit at least annually are the ones that stop worrying about it. The order matters: prune first, then review, and only then submit anywhere new.
Claim what exists before creating anything new -- duplicates are harder to remove than to avoid. Crucially, get the facts to agree, and search engines will do the rest without being asked. For dental practices, discovery still begins in a map or a directory more commonly than on a homepage.
Comparisons between competitors tend to show more than half of the problems trace back to a single unclaimed profile. Put plainly, local search rewards the ordinary and the verifiable more than it rewards the novel.
It's unglamorous work with an unusually reliable return. Set aside time to rebuild after any move or rebrand rather than treating it as a one-off project.
Further reading