Duplicate Listing

To find a local business, 97% of users will turn to a search engine like Google. Often, they'll find listings like your Google Business Profile in the local pack. And what they find here matters: your listings receive, on average, 2.7x the views your website does. Because of the visibility they give your brand, your listings are a core component of your local search strategy and geomarketing efforts.

As helpful as local listings are, duplicate listings can be hurtful. Duplicate listings are additional, unmanaged business listings for a single location or individual. They're often created automatically by publishers, or in error. They confuse search engines, dilute visibility in search results, and undermine a brand's reliability for their own digital information.

To rank well in local search, your listings need accurate name, address, and phone (NAP data) across the web. In fact, locations listings with complete core fields on their listings receive 62% more clicks than those that don't. Inconsistency in this information tells search engines that your listing isn't reliable, which can decrease your ranking on the SERP when a user makes a local search. When you have duplicate listings with inconsistent information, search engine crawlers and data aggregator algorithms are confused — and so are customers.

What causes duplicate listings?

Duplicate listings are most commonly caused by incorrect source data or publisher mistakes. There are typically four primary causes:

• Self-created duplicates occur when brands lack a cohesive strategy for dealing with business listings. Causes may be miscommunication or confusion among team members regarding who owns the listings management strategy. Or, they could be created through the use of a third-party tool or data aggregator that's meant to help manage your listings but doesn't offer a way to find duplicate listings.

• Aggregator-created duplicates are caused by data aggregators. Data aggregators are not as skilled at matching up records from multiple online sources and, as a result, they may create a duplicate listing to fill a perceived void.

• Publisher-created duplicates happen when publishers have lax matching and data cleanup practices. For example, you may have duplicate Google business listings if Google auto-creates a listing for you. This is why many publishers, including Google, rely on Yext for reliable digital knowledge directly from the brand itself.

• Cross-pollination duplicates are caused when aggregator results are sent to a publisher, but then web crawlers find the source on their own and create a duplicate listing for a single business.

How to fix duplicate listings

However a duplicate listing originated, it will need to be fixed before it impacts a brand's credibility (and local SEO performance). Unmanaged listings can send customers to incorrect physical and digital locations, and their reviews and Q&A go unmonitored and unanswered. Similarly, duplicate listings cause social data (like customer feedback) to be spread thin across several sites rather than compiled all in one place. This lowers a brand's search ranking as each individual listing brings in less content than a centralized source ultimately would.

Usually, when Google auto-creates a single listing, you can simply click 'claim this business' to begin the process of taking ownership. But if you have multiple listings or duplicate location listings (or, in some cases, duplicate people), you'll want to suppress the listing, otherwise known as duplicate suppression.

Duplicate Suppression is a key feature of Yext Listings that removes any duplicate listing from the Publisher Network so only accurate listings are shown. Through Duplicate Suppression, duplicate location listings are solved at the publisher level — as in, directly with Google Business Profile or TripAdvisor. Duplicate Suppression fixes both aggregator and publisher-created duplicates.