Local business data: the same name, address and hours

Why consistent data matters

Visitors use your name, address, phone number and opening hours to find you, call you or come by. Search engines and map services read the same data from your website. If the contact page says one thing and the footer another, people cannot tell which is right, and you lose calls and visits. Small differences add up: an old phone number in a PDF, holiday hours that nobody removed, a street name spelt in two ways.

Which data belongs together

• Name: the name customers know, written the same way every time. Decide whether you show the legal form, and stick to it.
• Address: street and number, postcode, town and country, in one fixed spelling.
• Phone: one main number, with the country code where people from abroad see it and in structured data.
• Email and the address of your website.
• Opening hours: the regular hours per day, plus holidays and seasonal changes.

Write this data down once, in one place, before you touch any page. It becomes the reference for every later change and every check.

Where your data appears

Your business data is rarely in one place. List every copy before you change anything.

Copies outside your website, such as profiles on maps, in directories and on social networks, need the same care. Keep one master list, for example a short table, and update every copy from it. Whoever changes the data changes the list first.

One spelling for everything

Choose one spelling and use it everywhere. The differences that matter most are not abbreviations but contradictions: two phone numbers, two house numbers, or different hours for the same day. Abbreviations such as St. and Street are less of a problem for people, but one spelling makes every check easier.

LocalBusiness structured data

Structured data describes your business in a form that programs can read, usually as JSON-LD in the page. Schema.org defines LocalBusiness as a particular physical business or branch of an organization and offers more specific types such as Dentist, Store or FoodEstablishment. Google describes which properties it uses:

• Required: name and address. For the address, Google asks for as many address fields as possible.
• Recommended, among others: telephone with country and area code, url of the specific location, geo with at least five decimal places, openingHoursSpecification and priceRange.
• Google recommends the most specific type that fits, for example Restaurant instead of LocalBusiness.

Google’s general guidelines for structured data say that the markup must be a true representation of the page content and that you should not mark up content that readers cannot see. So the values in the JSON-LD must match the visible text. If you change the address on the page, change it in the markup at the same time.

Opening hours without contradictions

• Write the hours in one format on every page, for example 09:00–18:00.
• Group days with the same hours, such as Monday to Friday, and keep the grouping the same on every page.
• In structured data, Google uses opens and closes per day. For a day that is closed all day, Google asks for 00:00 as both values, and for open around the clock 00:00 to 23:59.
• For holidays or a season, Google names validFrom and validThrough with a date. Without them, the hours apply all year.
• Remove holiday notices as soon as the holiday is over.

Moving or a new phone number

A move or a new number is the moment when most contradictions appear. Plan the change in steps, and search your site for the old values at the end. Tell everyone who answers the phone or writes emails, so that they give out the new data too.

A short routine

1. 1Once a quarter, open the contact page, the footer and the legal notice side by side and compare them with your master list.
2. 2After every change, search your site for the old phone number and the old street name.
3. 3Check the structured data after every change to the template or the shop system.
4. 4Before holidays, add the special hours with an end date, and remove them afterwards.

Work with Do4U

The Business data check reads a limited number of pages of your website, with contact, legal notice, directions and about pages first, or the list of pages you give it. It finds name, postal address, phone numbers, email addresses and opening hours in the text, in the footer, in tel: and mailto: links and in structured data. The code compares them across all pages: other spellings, other numbers, contradictory opening hours, markup that differs from the visible text, and phone numbers without a tel: link. You get a table per field with each value and where it was found, the findings, and a LocalBusiness JSON-LD that the code builds from the values most pages show. The AI is optional and only decides whether two spellings mean the same.

The Structured data check then tests the markup against the properties Google requires or recommends for local businesses. Values that appear only in images, maps or PDFs, or that JavaScript adds later, are not found. Check each value of the proposal before you use it, especially where the table shows a contradiction. Do4U finds hints, you check and decide.