Can your customers find you? Accuracy of local listings is a common problem for many businesses. In this Local search column from Search Engine Land Andrew Shotland looks at the data from 40,000 listings to see just how accurate they are.

The data shows that location data for these businesses has a large amount of inaccuracies and omissions. This issue affects customers and marketing managers alike.  The key comment for me was this:

Local business data on the Web has always been a mess, suffering from a combination of marrying conflicting information from multiple sources and lack of awareness by the businesses themselves. But with so many tools now available for businesses to control this information, it is surprising that the data consistency problem is still so common.

There are plenty of tough marketing tasks but this isn’t one of them, go and check how you are listed make sure your details are up to date in all the places they appear.