The website field · After you align · Refreshing without drift
Verify what a competitor in a crowded metro market has claimed before deciding where to submit. Across a large sufficient sample, the correlation between well-structured data and branded queries is hard to dismiss.
The pattern repeats: the businesses that audit at least annually are the ones that stop worrying about it. Photograph or screenshot each profile before editing -- reversions do happen.
The data from most clean-up projects indicates clean-up work pays back fastest for restaurants and cafes. In other words, keep the record consistent, revisit it every month, and most local problems solve themselves. Do not submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree. The usual culprit is mismatched opening hours, unobtrusively inherited from an old listing no one remembers creating.
Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected.
Claim what exists before creating anything new -- duplicates are harder to remove than to avoid.
Typically, keep a change log; six months on, no one remembers which field was edited or why, more so after a move or a rebrand.