Get Us Listed builds and cleans up local citations for businesses in York PA and across Central Pennsylvania, Maryland and the DC Metro. A citation is any place online that names your business and its contact details, and search engines use the agreement between those records to decide whether you are real and where you are. Most businesses have dozens they never created, and the records disagree. We find every one, settle on the single correct version, correct the ones that are wrong, remove the duplicates, and keep them in agreement afterwards.
Almost no business we audit for owners in York, Lancaster and Harford County is missing citations. Nearly every one has citations that contradict each other, and the contradictions are the problem.
You moved, or changed numbers, or dropped the tracking number from a campaign three years ago. The directories that copied the old record from each other never got the memo, and a customer following one of them ends up at your old unit.
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"Smith Plumbing LLC", "Smith Plumbing & Heating", "Smith's Plumbing" and the name with the town bolted on. To a person they are the same company. To a system deciding whether to trust a listing, they are four businesses that each look slightly unsure of themselves.
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Two Google profiles, two Yelp pages, a Facebook page from a former employee. Reviews land on the wrong one, the ratings split, and Google may suspend both while it works out which is real.
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A handful of data companies supply the details hundreds of directories display. Correct a directory by hand and the aggregator overwrites it next quarter. Until the source is fixed, every correction is temporary.
Get a Better WebsiteFive steps, in the order they have to happen. Open the one you care about — the rest stay out of your way.
Citation work starts with an inventory, because you cannot correct what you have not found. We search for the business by every version of its name, by every phone number it has used, and by every address it has occupied, across the general directories, the map services, the industry and trade directories for what you do, the local chambers and business associations, and the data aggregators that feed all of them.
What comes back is usually a surprise: listings created automatically from public records, listings a former marketing company set up and abandoned, a profile a well-meaning customer started, and the old address living on in a dozen places. Each record is logged with what it says and where it disagrees with the truth.
The audit also finds what is missing — the directories your customers and your competitors actually use where you do not appear at all. For most trades that is a short list, and it is a different list for a dentist than for a roofer.
The free audit at the bottom of this page is a lighter version of this step, run by a person, and it tells you honestly whether the rest of the work is worth paying for.
Before a single correction is made, we settle the canonical record with you: the exact legal or trading name you want everywhere, the address written one way (suite numbers, abbreviations and all), the one phone number that should be primary, the website address with or without the www, the hours, the categories. That record is written down and it is the version every other record is measured against.
This step is where most do-it-yourself citation work goes wrong. Fixing listings one at a time, each slightly differently, replaces one set of contradictions with another. The value is in the agreement, not in the volume.
It also has to match your own website and your Google Business Profile exactly. The business-identity check inside our own tooling flags a phone number on your site that does not match the configured one, for exactly this reason: the site is a citation too, and it is the one you control completely. Keeping the profile itself correct is Google Business Profile management, and the two jobs are usually done together.
A few data companies supply the business details that hundreds of directories, apps and in-car navigation systems display. If their record is wrong, a directory you corrected by hand will be overwritten the next time it refreshes from them. So the aggregators are corrected first, and the individual directories after, in the order they propagate.
Each directory has its own process — a claim-and-verify flow, an email to a support desk, a form that takes weeks — and some are slow. This is patient, unglamorous work, and it is why it is done on a schedule rather than in a burst: the corrections land over weeks, and each one is checked after it should have appeared.
Corrections are made in your name. Where a directory needs an account, it is registered to your email address, not ours, so that when we are done you hold every login. Ownership of the listings is never a thing you have to ask for back.
Duplicate listings are handled through each platform’s own merge or removal process rather than by deleting anything: a duplicate Google profile is reported and merged so the reviews it collected are not lost, a duplicate Yelp page is reported as such, a stray Facebook page is claimed and merged or unpublished. Deleting a listing outright is the last resort, because a listing with history is worth keeping if it can be folded into the real one.
Then the gaps are filled. New listings are created only on directories that matter for your trade and your area — the ones a customer might actually use, or that a search engine treats as authoritative for your category. A plumber in York County and a law firm in Bel Air get different lists. We do not submit to hundreds of directories nobody visits, because a citation on a site with no readers is a record to keep consistent for no benefit.
Every new listing carries the canonical record, a description written for the reader rather than stuffed with keywords, real photographs where the directory allows them, and the categories that match what you sell.
Citations do not stay fixed on their own. An aggregator refreshes from a stale source, a directory imports a public record, a customer suggests an edit, and a correction made in spring has been undone by autumn. So the canonical record is re-checked against every listing on a schedule, and anything that has drifted is corrected again.
What we can measure honestly: how many listings were found, how many disagreed with the canonical record, how many were corrected, how many were removed or merged, how many were added, and how many still disagree at each check. What nobody can measure honestly is exactly what a consistent record did to your map ranking, because the ranking depends on a dozen other things at once and nobody outside Google can isolate one. We report the consistency, and we say plainly that it is one input among several.
Citation work is part of local SEO rather than a substitute for it; it is the part that has to be right before the rest can work, and a realistic timeline for local businesses sets out how long the whole of that takes.
There is no trick to consistent citations. There is an inventory, one correct record, patient corrections in the right order, and a check afterwards. Here is exactly what we do.
Every listing found by every name, number and address the business has used, across the directories, maps, trade sites and aggregators — with what each one says and where it disagrees.
One canonical record agreed with you, pushed to the data aggregators first and then to every directory, so the corrections stay corrected.
Duplicate profiles merged through each platform's own process so reviews are not lost, and new listings created only on the directories that matter for your trade and area.
The canonical record re-checked against every listing on a schedule, drift corrected, and a plain-English report of what was found and fixed.
Including the ones that are awkward for an agency to answer. Use the filter if you are looking for something specific.
Fewer than the number on most sales pages. A business needs to be correct on the major maps and search engines, the data aggregators that feed everything else, the general directories people actually use, and the handful of trade and local directories relevant to what you do and where. That is dozens, not hundreds.
Services that promise submission to hundreds of directories are counting listings nobody reads, each of which is one more record to keep consistent forever. We would rather you had forty that agree than four hundred that do not.
On its own, no, and we will not tell you it will. Consistent citations are one of several things Google weighs, alongside the profile itself, reviews, the website and simple distance from the searcher. A business with immaculate citations and the wrong primary category still does not appear.
What citation work does is remove a reason to be distrusted. It is foundation, and foundation is worth doing first because everything else stands on it — but a foundation is not a building.
Yes, with patience. The work is not difficult; it is slow, repetitive and easy to abandon at the twentieth directory support form. If you want to, start with the aggregators and the Google Business Profile power-up checklist, write your canonical record down first, and correct everything against it.
What people pay us for is finishing the list, checking each correction actually appeared, and coming back to it when the records drift — which they will.
Add a town name or a keyword to your business name on the listings. Register a virtual office, a mailbox or a friend’s address to appear in a second town. Create a second profile for the same location. List a phone number that forwards somewhere it should not. Each of those is a policy violation on the platforms that matter, each is regularly detected, and a suspended profile has no map presence at all.
You do. Every account created to claim or correct a listing is registered to your email address, and the logins are handed over in one document at the end. Nothing is registered in our name, and there is no software subscription you are left paying for.
Everything: the corrected listings, the canonical record, the account logins, and the last audit report. Citations do not undo themselves when the work stops; they drift slowly, and the ongoing check is the part you would be giving up.
A local citation is any online mention of your business that includes its name, address and phone number: a directory listing, a map entry, a chamber of commerce page, an industry site. Search engines compare these records with each other, and with your website and Google Business Profile, as one way of deciding whether the business is real and where it is. The plain-English marketing glossary covers the rest of the vocabulary.
Local citations work costs a one-time clean-up fee, priced by how many listings the audit finds and how much disagrees, plus an optional small monthly add-on for the ongoing checks, with no long contract. How pricing works covers the billing detail, and the free audit at the bottom of this page tells you the size of the job before you pay for anything.
A local citations clean-up takes weeks, not days: the audit and the canonical record take days, but the corrections land over weeks, because some directories are slow to process changes and the aggregators propagate on their own schedules. We check each correction after it should have appeared rather than declaring the job done on the day it was submitted.
Exactly this work, and soon. An address change is the commonest cause of contradictory citations, because the old address survives in every directory that copied it. The audit finds each one, the aggregators are corrected first so they stop re-spreading the old address, and the individual directories follow.
Yes, and it is the one you control completely. The name, address and phone number on the site should match the canonical record exactly, including the business schema in the page code. Getting the site’s own details right is part of the web design work, and our tooling flags a phone number on the site that does not match the configured one.
The tools push a record out; they do not audit what is already there, decide the canonical version, merge duplicates or chase a directory that ignored the change. Some are useful for the aggregator step, and we use them where they help. The judgement and the follow-up are the part a tool does not do.
Google and the other map services for everyone; after that it depends. Home services businesses need the contractor and home-improvement directories; practices need the health directories; firms need the legal ones; restaurants need the review and booking sites. We list only where your customers and competitors actually are, and we will tell you which those are before we add anything.
Indirectly: several of the directories that matter are also review sites, and a correct, claimed listing is where customers can leave and where you can answer them. Asking for and answering those reviews is its own job, and that is review and reputation management.
Usually the one with the reviews and the history, merged with the other through Google’s own process so nothing is lost. Deleting one outright throws away whatever it collected. Duplicate profiles are handled inside Google Business Profile management when the profile is the main problem, and inside this citation work when they are one of many listings.
Yes, and it is where consistency matters most: each location needs its own correct record, and the records must not blur into each other. The audit is done per location, the canonical records are written per location, and the corrections are tracked per location so a fix at one branch does not overwrite another.
No. A service-area business hides its address on Google and on most directories and lists the towns and counties it serves instead. The canonical record for a service-area business carries the service area, not the home address, and the directories that require an address get the one you choose to publish — never a mailbox or a virtual office.
No. The clean-up is a one-time project and the checks are month to month. Every account is in your name, and if we stop working together you keep the corrected listings, the record and the logins. What happens after you get in touch sets out the first weeks.
When a search engine decides which business to show for a search near you, it is partly asking a simple question: is this business real, and is it where it says it is? It answers that by comparing every record it can find — the website, the Google profile, the map services, the directories, the aggregators — and a business whose records all say the same thing is easy to trust. A business whose records disagree looks uncertain, and uncertainty is a reason to show someone else. That is why local citations in York PA and everywhere else we work are about agreement rather than volume. Each individual mismatch is minor. The sum of them is a company that never quite adds up. Settling one correct record and pushing it everywhere is slow, unglamorous work, and it is also the kind of work that stays done: once the aggregators carry the right record, most of the internet follows.
If you have ever paid for citation submissions and wondered what you got, here is our answer in plain terms. Every listing is found by every name, number and address the business has used. The canonical record is agreed with you and written down. The data aggregators are corrected first, so their next refresh spreads the right record rather than the wrong one. Every directory is corrected against the record, in your name, and each correction is checked after it should have appeared. Duplicate listings are merged through the platform’s own process so reviews are kept. New listings are added only where your customers and competitors actually are. Then the record is re-checked on a schedule, and a short report says how many listings agree, how many were fixed, and what is still outstanding. If a service cannot tell you which directories it touched and what each one says now, that is your answer.
Three free ways to see where your listings stand — two you can use today, one is a real audit by a real person.
Ten yes/no questions — the same ones we open paid audits with. Instant score and a personalized gap list. Nothing is submitted anywhere.
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The full checklist we work through on every Google profile, published free — the record every other listing is measured against.
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What the audit covers, what you get back, and why there is genuinely no catch.
See what you get →Hyperlocal expertise where it matters; regional reach where it pays. Click any market to see exactly what we do there.
Grouped by subject. Older material is kept where it is still accurate.
Send your business name, the town you work from, and any old address or number you have used. Within 48 hours we'll send a written audit — every listing we found, which ones disagree, and the order to fix things in. No sales call required.
