7 decisions to make before you list your business anywhere

Our first paying customer typed his postcode wrong. One letter.

Both versions were real postcodes, a few doors apart, so nothing flagged it. By the time we spotted it, the wrong one was live on 2 directories and queued for 11 more. His website, his schema markup and Companies House all agreed with each other. Our order form was the odd one out. It took most of a morning to unpick.

That's the whole problem with business listings in one example. Every directory copies what you give it, exactly. So the work that matters happens before the first listing: deciding what your details are, once, and writing them down.

Here are the 7 decisions, in the order I'd make them.

1. Your business name

Use the name customers know you by, written the same way every time. Google's guidelines for Business Profiles say your name should reflect your real-world name, as you use it consistently on your shopfront. I'd add your website, invoices and van to that list.

The decisions hiding inside "name":

• Ltd or not. "Hartley Removals and Storage Ltd" or "Hartley Removals and Storage". Either is fine. Both is the problem.
• & or and. One of our customers had "&" on their website and "and" on Companies House. Pick one.
• Capitals. If your brand is written in capitals, write it in capitals everywhere. "ACE" on some listings and "Ace" on others is 2 different strings to a machine.

Don't add keywords or a town. "Smith Plumbing Manchester Boiler Repairs" breaks Google's guidelines and looks like spam on every directory it lands on.

2. Your address, and which one

Most limited companies have 2 addresses: the registered office on Companies House and the place they actually trade. The registered office is often the accountant's.

List the address customers can find you at, and make sure it's the same one on your Google Business Profile. If you work from home and don't see customers there, decide now whether you'll show the address at all, because that choice has to be the same everywhere too.

Then fix the format:

• "Unit 4, Mill House" or "Unit 4 Mill House"
• "Station Road" or "Station Rd"
• Town only ("Oldham") or town plus county

Write it the way Royal Mail does and you won't go far wrong.

3. Your postcode, checked 3 ways

This is the one that bit us, so it gets its own step.

Look your address up on Royal Mail's postcode finder. Then check it matches your website footer and, if you're a limited company, Companies House. If those 3 disagree, sort that out before you list anywhere. A wrong postcode puts you on the wrong street on every map that reads the listing.

4. One public phone number

Our first customer gave us a mobile on one form and a landline on the next. Our own systems used one in one place and the other somewhere else, so his first 2 listings disagreed with each other within an hour.

Decide on one number customers ring. For most trades I'd lean towards a landline with a local area code, but a mobile is fine if it's the number you'll keep. What matters is that it's the same everywhere.

Two related decisions:

• Format. UK numbers have standard spacing. Manchester is written 0161 496 0000, London 020 7946 0000, mobiles 07700 900123. Pick the standard layout for your code. We found our own admin screen rewriting 0161 numbers as "01616 606759", which is exactly the kind of drift you don't want.
• Sign-up codes. Some sites text a code to the business phone at sign-up, and a landline can't receive texts. Use your mobile for the code, then set the public number on the profile to your chosen one.

5. Your website address

Pick one exact form and stick to it: https:// or not, www or not, and always your homepage rather than a deep page. "https://www.example.co.uk" and "example.co.uk/contact" look like 2 different websites to a directory that stores the text as typed.

6. Your main category, in plain words

Every directory asks what you do, and most make you pick from their own list. Decide your one main category and 2 or 3 secondary ones before you start, and choose the nearest match to that wording on each site.

Be careful with tools that guess for you. When we set up a removals company through a bulk submission service, its category matching filed them as a plumber, because the tool fell back to a default for "trades". A padlock supplier came out as "Park and Ride". We now set the category by hand and check it on screen before anything is submitted.

7. Your description, written once in 3 lengths

Directories ask for different lengths: a one-liner, a paragraph, and sometimes a long "about us". Write all 3 now:

• Short, under 160 characters: what you do and where.
• Medium, about 300 characters: add your main services.
• Long, up to about 750 characters: add your areas, your history and what makes you different.

Writing them fresh on every site is how a business ends up described 30 slightly different ways.

Put it all on one sheet

When the 7 decisions are made, put them on a single page: name, address lines, postcode, phone, website, email, categories, the 3 descriptions and your opening hours. Then copy from that sheet every time. Never retype.

Retyping is where the one-letter postcode came from. It's also where a missing "Ltd" or a "St" instead of "Street" creeps in on listing 23 when you're tired.

Already listed somewhere?

You probably are. Old directory pages, data companies and Companies House all hold copies of your details. Before you add new listings, run your business through our free NAP checker and fix anything that disagrees with your new sheet. The hidden cost of NAP inconsistency walks through how to find and correct those older listings.

Then build forward from the sheet. That's how we run every citation build: the customer's details sit on one screen, we check them against their own website, and every listing is copied from that screen.