Your phone number is different in four places, and it is costing you

Every established Indian business has been listed in more places than it remembers. Trade directories, IndiaMART, JustDial, industry association pages, an exhibition catalogue from 2015 that’s still online.

Most of those listings are wrong in some small way. And systems that recommend businesses cross reference all of them.

Why disagreement is expensive

When a search engine or an assistant finds three different phone numbers for you, it has to decide which is right. Sometimes it picks correctly. Sometimes it picks the 2015 landline that now rings in an office you left.

Either way its confidence drops, and lower confidence means it’s less likely to recommend you when a buyer asks.

The four things that must match exactly

• Legal business name. One version. If you’re Sharma Industries Private Limited, don’t be Sharma Inds Pvt Ltd in some places.
• Address. Same format everywhere, down to how you write the plot number and whether you abbreviate Road.
• Phone number. One primary number, same format, with the country code.
• Website URL. Same version. Pick https and either www or non www, and use that everywhere.

Exactly means exactly. These are matched by machines, not read charitably by people.

Finding what’s out there

Search your company name in quotes. Then search your phone number in quotes. Then your old phone number, if you’ve changed it. Then your address.

Write down every listing you find with anything wrong on it. Most businesses find between five and twenty.

Fixing them, in priority order

Start with the ones that rank highest when you search your own name, because those are the ones being read. Your own website first, then Google Business Profile, then whichever marketplace or directory sits at the top.

Some old listings have no route to edit them and no contact address. Leave those. The goal is that the great majority agree, not perfection.

The one that’s usually wrong

The website’s own footer. It’s often the oldest text on the site and it frequently carries a landline nobody answers, or an address from before the plant moved.

Check yours now. It appears on every single page, so if it’s wrong, it’s wrong hundreds of times over.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.