Even so, more usefully, this is maintenance work, and maintenance work only fails when it stops.
Across a large sufficient sample, the correlation between clean data and profile views is hard to dismiss. A single dated field can propagate through business data providers long after the original entry was fixed, at least in a competitive market.
Do not submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree. Typically, twenty verified profiles outperform two hundred abandoned ones, every time, at least in a competitive market. The pattern repeats: the businesses that audit at the start of every quarter are the ones that stop worrying about it.
Photograph or screenshot each profile before editing — reversions do happen. Where an ad stops working the moment the budget ends, a corrected record does not. By contrast, once a contradiction enters the aggregator layer it tends to resurface months later. The pattern across audits is that the majority of profiles carry at least one contradiction, which is why it keeps being rediscovered.
Outbound notes
Verify what a competitor within a single postcode has claimed before deciding where to submit. Voice assistants rarely announce a penalty here — they simply rank a less certain record lower.
Volume flatters a report; agreement is what actually moves position in the local pack. Anyone who has run a bulk audit knows clean-up work pays back fastest for plumbing companies.
Practitioner surveys suggest more than half of the problems trace back to a single unclaimed profile. Chasing obscure directories is less valuable than fixing the three sources search engines actually read.
Resist the urge to vary the business name for keywords; consistency beats cleverness here. Data aggregators weigh source quality as well as source count, so where a citation sits matters. In practice, a directory entry is worth less than an editorial mention, yet it is far easier to keep current. Listing audits repeatedly suggest the gap between a neat profile and a neglected one widens in a crowded metro market.
Crucially, keep a change log; six months on, nobody remembers which field was edited or why.
Verify by phone or postcode lookup, not by memory.
Anything unverifiable should be removed rather than corrected, give or take a reporting cycle.