For reasons that may or may not have to do with local SEO, you need to fix your online listings. Maybe you want to fix 50, or just one.
All these sites all make you jump through hoops. You’ve done everything they’ve asked you to. You’ve filled out their forms to submit new listings as directed, and to make fixes as directed. You’ve waited.
That process has probably worked for most of your listings, but you’ve got stragglers. Either the form’s broken, or you get an error message no matter what you do, or the changes don’t stick, or it’s been 5 months and they still haven’t processed your listing.
It’s time to bother a human. Someone who works at the site.
That’s only fair. You may only have a free listing and not pay the site directly for a primo listing, but they can only make money from ads if they have a business directory big or good enough to get them traffic, which they boast about in order to sell the ads. Your business info is part of their directory, and therefore part of their sales pitch. They owe it to you to make basic fixes to your listing, if they don’t give you the means to do it yourself.
But most of these places don’t give you an easy way to reach someone who can help. (Hey, time is money.) So how do you reach someone?
I’ve compiled a list of support-team emails for various local directories, search engines, and data-aggregators.
Many of these addresses my helpers and I have used successfully. Others are for sites we’ve never needed to contact by email. All should reach someone who can help you, or who will refer you to someone in a neighboring cubicle who can.
Please email wisely:
- Use a domain email if at all possible (yourname@yourcompanysite.com). Consider setting up one, if you don’t already use it for your citations.
- Be polite. Maybe you hate the yellowpages-type company, but the support rep didn’t do anything to you (and can always find a way to decline your request if you’re nasty).
- Make it clear exactly what you want, so they can oblige you without wasting your time or theirs on back-and-forth.
- Make it clear you’ve tried everything else, including the normal channels.
- Don’t email them 5 times in a day because they didn’t get back to you within the hour.
- If for some reason they can’t say yes to your request, ask how you can get your listing fixed.
- If you have 75 locations, first ask how you should go about getting those listings fixed en masse.
- Don’t email them constantly. If you pee in the pool, we’ll all have to get out (but might want to throw you back in).
Here are the support emails, from A to Z, for 21 sites you might be wrangling with:
Acxiom / MyBusinessListingManager email:
mblm@acxiom.com
Angie’s List emails:
angieslist@angieslist.com or memberservices@angieslist.com
Apple MapsConnect emails:
mapsconnect@apple.com or mapsconnect-business@apple.com
Bing Places email:
placesfeedback@microsoft.com
City-Data.com email:
errors@city-data.com
CitySearch / InsiderPages emails:
myaccount@citygridmedia.com or customerservice@citygrid.com
Cylex email:
info@cylex-usa.com
Factual email:
accounts@factual.com
Foursquare business email:
support@foursquare.com
InfoGroup / ExpressUpdate email:
contentfeedback@infogroup.com
LocalEze emails:
support@neustar.biz, support@localeze.com, or localezesupport@neustar.biz
Manta email:
help@manta.com
MapQuest email:
supportteam@mapquest.com
MerchantCircle emails :
toplevelsupport@merchantcircle.com or support@merchantcircle.com
ShowMeLocal email:
support@showmelocal.com
SuperPages & DexKnows email:
customerservice@supermedia.com
Yahoo Local email
listings-support@yahoo-inc.com
(If Yext won’t help you – and you’ve tried their free-fix method – you can email Yahoo. We’ve had success in getting duplicates removed this way.)
Yellowbook emails:
team@hibubusiness.com or servicecenter@hibu.com
YellowBot email:
help@yellowbot.com
YellowPages emails:
ypcsupport@yp.com or customer.care@yp.com
Yelp Business email:
feedback@yelp.com
I don’t have a direct, non-phone-tree phone number for most of these (yet?). If you also want non-email ways to contact some of these sites, here are a few great resources:
Be Where Your Customers Are with Local Business Listings – Max Minzer
(includes some phone numbers and extra detail)
Major Internet Business Directories – Mike Munter
(includes some phone numbers and extra detail)
Twitter Handles for Local Business Citation Sources – Bill Bean
(in case you want to try to get help via Twitter)
Thanks to Austin Lund for letting me know about some emails (see his comment).
Special thanks to Nyagoslav of Whitespark for telling me about a few emails I didn’t know about. By the way, if the thought of fixing all your listings yourself makes you feel like Fred Sanford, consider hiring Whitespark to help clean up your citations.
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Which sites have been helpful – or not helpful – when you’ve emailed them?
Any email addresses you’re still looking for?
Any emails I’m missing?
Leave a comment!
As always Phil, PURE GOLD!!!
Thanks
Phil,
Thanks for this list. Its going to come in handy!
Cracking stuff as usual Phil! Thanks
What a great and HELPFUL post! thanks Phil 🙂
Great list, Phil. We’ve had success contacting customer.care@yp.com to get our clients’ duplicate listings removed from there as well.
Thanks, Dylan!
Phil – You always seem to come up with go-to information that most local marketing experts don’t even know about. As usual, I’m knocked out by the quality of your information and your generosity of spirit in sharing it publicly. I’m ssssooooo glad I’m on your list! — Edgar
Amazing of you share this!
Thank you Phil!!
Great list Phil!
Looking forward to getting in touch with Yahoo:
About Yahoo! They appear to be off-the-grid and all my previously claimed and managed listings (18 or so) are gone 🙁
Here’s their old URL: https://listings.local.yahoo.com/account – which now takes you to Aabaco Small Business.
Any ideas or help in this regard?
Thanks
If you tried the free-update option that Yext provides (linked to in the post), the next step is just to email Yahoo.
Thanks Phil, this is great.
Manually building up and maintaining citations and listings can be a chore for sure, this should help people immeasurably. My one recommendation is to not gloss over the “please email wisely” portion. Using an @domainname.com vs. gmail has helped us get a much better response rate. Being concise and accurate about the issues on the listing helps as well.
Best of luck and copied this link into my team’s slack – thanks Phil.
Mike
Thanks, Mike. Yeah, using a domain email is huge.
Great resource with new emails! Here are four alternate emails that work effectively for any issue on four of the sites you listed:
Apple MapsConnect: mapsconnect-business@apple.com
LocalEze: localezesupport@neustar.biz
Yellowbook: servicecenter@hibu.com
YellowPages: customer.care@yp.com (I prefer to call https://adsolutions.yp.com/contact-us since it’s quicker)
Hey, thanks, Austin! I’ve updated the post.
Thanks Phil, helpful as always! I have had trouble connecting to localpages.com for over a year. now. It seems the only way to change anything incorrect there is via yext.com, which simply creates an overlay for as long as you pay for their service 🙁
Has anyone had any luck getting a response from Yellowbot’s help@yellowbot.com in recent months? We can’t seem to get a response from them…any advise greatly appreciated 🙂
Great article!
I used to use Connectivity (help@connectivity.com) for all my Yellowbot support requests, but I heard Connectivity may be going out of business. They sort run Yellowbot (so logo https://www.yellowbot.com/). Connectivity recently stopped answering my requests, plus their https://solfo.zendesk.com/ is no longer available. I haven’t used help@yellowbot.com much recently, but it hasn’t been very responsive to me in the past. I also noticed Yellowbot’s mail system is down–for my clients at least. It seems like the only way to get anything done on Yellowbot is by doing a phone verification–if the phone number on the listing is correct. But this is just my experience.
I agree, the only way to get anything done is by doing a phone verification’s. However, some of our clients listings on Yellowbot have the wrong phone number listed so we end up back at square one. Thanks for the reply!
Interesting news about Yellowbot, but not at all surprising. In fact, this past month I tried phone verification for 2 separate clients a few times and it wasn’t working, I guess now I know why.
True. I just heard from WhiteSpark that the phone verification system has been down for a couple weeks or so. I guess we should give up on this site for now.
Most excellent. And great imagery too
Hi Phil, a quick question to you and all the other here: do you manually list your business(es) on all these directories or you use a dedicated service (Yell Local Listing, Moz Local…) thanks.
What a super list, Phil! Thanks for digging through all the data to surface this resource for all of us. Nice work. And, BTW, I always thought Sanford & Son had the best opening theme. 🙂
I could listen to it for hours – that and the Fred-Esther exchanges 🙂
Thank you Phil. I agree with Matt, that is “cracking stuff.” Once again you have gone over and above to deliver real value. I plan to make a print copy and save it to my desktop if you don’t mind. You make me a better marketer. Thank you.
OMG Phil – You Rock! Muchas Gracias!
Phil – You are making it too easy for us. Thanks for the hard work!
Tim
Thanks, Phil,
Excellent information, generously shared, as usual.
Do you have a connection in Australia, who may have equivalent information for that market?
Keep up the good work,
Cheers,
John
John,
Can’t say I’ve researched it. Some of the emails I’ve listed should work in AU. Also, there aren’t too many important AU-specific sites to worry about, so you shouldn’t run into too many gaps.
I always enjoy tweeting my frustration – often get a response with an email or a customer service phone #. Has worked in several circumstances.
Nice going, Kristen!
What Kristen said – we have had a fair bit of success with tweeting. BizWiki and its aggregators has always been the hardest one for us. There is a twitter and an email but they don’t always get answered.
Phil,
I have unsubscribed from virtually all email subscriptions because of the constant barrage of sales pitches.
But your emails I look forward to because you always have information that is useful and NO sales pitch! You are one of few email marketers that get it.
I appreciate the time you take to help your subscribers. Keep up the good work!
Kevin
This information is very helpful! Thanks for sharing. I wonder if it would be possible to almost crowd-source this with local SEO’s via Google Sheets. It’s always helpful to have support email address for as many sites as possible!
I’ve gotten a good number of contributions from other local SEOs, and would love more!
Hi Phil!
I just revisited this blog because as a local SEOer finding the pulse of local digital marketing is ever changing. For example: Darren Shaw has a Moz Local presentation about dups not mattering as much and other industry studies from Andrew Shotland say that duplicates don’t matter like we think they do.
I honestly, believe them, but find value in removing dups from high ranking Barnicle sites, branded keyword searches, and high traffic sites like a GMB profile, Yelp, Bing, etc. of course this depends on the industry.
How do you sift through the hoops of removing dups? Do you try to remove them all from the sites in this blog post or do you pick the most valuable ones?
Thanks!
Lance
Good question, Lance. My approach to duplicates is not to get too OCD about them, and to focus on sites where a duplicate can cause a specific and visible problem. For instance, if you have multiple Yelp or BBB or Facebook pages, it’s possible that customers will review you on the wrong pages – spreading the benefits thin. Or if you’ve got duplicates on the main data-aggregators (e.g. InfoGroup) you’re likely then to have duplicates on a bunch of other sites, so it’s worth nipping that one in the bud.
But duplicates on Brownbook, MerchantCircle, YellowBot, etc.? Not worth the hassle.
Thanks, Phil!
You’re always so helpful and insightful!
Thanks for saying so, Lance!
thanks Phil what would we do with out you!
Pete
Phil did google make a change ? I have been on maps for years and then not showing in top 3 no matter how many blogs I do some one told me I had to be in the down town area to show in top 3 so I changed my address I have 71 reviews any ideas ? help