Your directory listings

A citation is your business name, address and phone number printed somewhere that is not your own website. Yelp, Apple Maps, the Better Business Bureau, a trade directory. It does not have to link to you. It has to agree with you.

An assistant answering a local question does not read one source. It reads many. A business whose phone number disagrees across four of them is a business it has a reason to leave out, and an address that disagrees is worse, because the assistant cannot tell which one to send somebody to.

Before anything is submitted, we check where you already appear. The point is to order only what is genuinely missing, so you are not paying to be added to a directory that already has you.

A reading says what we found. Where a directory does not return you, that is recorded as not found, which is a different fact from not listed, and your page says which one it is.

Your phone number and your address. Both get printed on every submission and both are slow and expensive to take back, so nothing is ordered until you have confirmed them.

Your directories page shows the exact record we submit, in the form it goes out. If a line on it is wrong, fix it there before the order goes rather than after.

A core set of general directories for everyone, and your trade adds its own on top. A medical practice picks up the health directories; the set is chosen from what your listing says you actually do.

Some of the names on the list are data aggregators rather than places a customer visits. Those matter more than they look: one submission to an aggregator fans your record out across a long tail of smaller sites that nobody would submit to by hand.

A submission is a request, not a write. Each directory has its own queue, its own review, and in some cases a person who approves it. Some publish within days, some take weeks, and a few never publish at all.

So your page shows four numbers rather than one: ordered, live, still pending, and the ones that could not be placed. They add up to each other, and they are counted off the build and nothing else. The last group is named rather than folded into "the rest", because seven listings that were never coming should not read as seven that are about to land.

• The line at the top: how many were ordered, how many are live, and when the rest are due.
• The list: every directory in your network with where you stand on each one.
• The record: the exact name, address and phone we submit.
• The date of the last read, once it is old enough to matter. A count with nothing dating it reads as a count from this morning.

There is no email for directory progress. A queue is not news, and a weekly message saying two more went live would be a message you learn to ignore.

Tell us, and the sync goes out again across the network. This is one of the four kinds of work that does not wait for an approval, because it is your own record being made consistent rather than anything new being said about you.