We spent last week doing something unglamorous across every website we host, and the result is worth explaining because most business sites have the same problem.
Search engines and AI assistants build a picture of your business from structured data on your site — a code block stating your name, address, phone, hours and services. Get it right and you’re quotable. Get it wrong and you’re a guess.
Here’s what we actually found when we looked.
Twenty sites were publishing two competing business listings. Four were publishing three or more. This happens because SEO plugins each add their own, and a site that has picked up two or three plugins over the years ends up describing itself two or three times, often with different details. On two sites the competing listings carried different business names.
A search engine reading that has to choose which version of you to believe. It usually chooses badly.
So we went through all thirty-three. One listing per site. Real street address or, for the businesses that work from a van rather than a shopfront, a proper list of the towns they serve. Phone numbers, opening hours, services in the words a customer would actually use. For a client with two branches, both locations published properly and linked, so nobody thinks one building moved.
We finished with every site publishing exactly one clear listing — and a dated record of every check on every site, so the work is provable rather than claimed.
If you don’t know whether your site does this correctly, that’s normal, and it’s not something you can see by looking at the page. We’re happy to check.