Most people looking for a local business never reach the website first. They see the Google listing — the panel with the map pin, the star rating, the hours and the call button — and a good share of them act on it right there without clicking anything.
Which means you have two shopfronts, not one. Both are public, both are yours, and they were probably last updated years apart by different people for different reasons. Nobody ever sits down and compares them, so they drift — and the drift is invisible to you specifically, because you already know the right answer to every question either one is being asked.
The four facts that drift#
It's almost always the same four, and they fail in different ways.
The phone number
The expensive one. A business changes phone systems, adds a tracking number for an advertising campaign, or moves the office line to a mobile — and updates one of the two places. Somebody taps the wrong one and reaches a dead line or a stranger. They do not then try the other number. They try the next business.
The hours
The one that generates the bad review. Your listing says open until two on Saturday; the site says closed weekends. Someone drives over. Seasonal hours are worse, because they're changed in one place with every good intention of changing the other.
The address, or the service area
Usually small — a suite number on one and not the other, or an old address that still resolves to your unit. It matters less to a human than to the machines that use it to work out whether two mentions of your business are the same business.
The link itself
The most-missed of the four, and the easiest to fix. Where does the website link on your listing actually point? On a site that's been rebuilt, it frequently still points at a page that no longer exists, or at an old address that redirects twice before it lands. Nobody checks, because everyone clicks their own site from a bookmark.
What the disagreement actually costs#
Two separate costs, and they're worth separating because only one of them is about search engines.
The first is customers, and it's the bigger one. A person who acts on wrong information doesn't experience it as an error on your part — they experience it as your business being unreliable. The dead phone number reads as "they've closed down." The wrong Saturday hours read as "they don't care." Neither of those people tells you what happened, and neither shows up in any report you'll ever look at. It's the most invisible way a small business loses work.
Nobody tells you they called the wrong number. They just call somebody else.
The second is that machines are reading both. Google's own guidance for local businesses is to keep your information accurate and consistent everywhere it appears, and there's a straightforward reason: search engines are trying to work out whether all these mentions of a plumber on Mill Street are one business or several. Agreement makes that easy. Disagreement makes it a judgement call, and you don't get told how the call went.
How much weight that carries is not something anyone outside Google knows, and anybody quoting you a percentage is guessing. Treat it as a floor rather than a strategy: consistency won't lift you above a better competitor, but inconsistency is a self-inflicted handicap that costs nothing to remove.
Check yours in ten minutes#
Do this on a phone, and do it signed out of your Google account or in a private window — signed in, Google shows you a management view rather than what a customer sees.
The ten-minute comparison
- Search your business name and open the listing panel as a stranger would see it
- Put the listing and your own site's contact page side by side — literally, two windows
- Phone: identical, digit for digit? Including which number is listed first if you have several
- Hours: identical for every day, including the ones you're closed, and are your holiday hours current in both?
- Address: identical, suite number and all — or, if you don't take visitors, is the service area described the same way in both?
- Business name: the same words in the same order. "Ellery Plumbing" and "Ellery Plumbing & Heating LLC" are two different names to a machine
- The website link: tap it, and see where it lands
- Then check the same details anywhere else you're listed — the directory a trade body runs, your Facebook page, the listing your supplier maintains
If you'd rather have it done for you, we built a free Listing Check that reads your public Google listing and your website and tells you where they disagree. It reads what anyone can see, needs no login and no access to your accounts, and it's genuinely free — it exists because this mismatch is common, consequential, and fixable in an afternoon by whoever already looks after the website.
How it drifts in the first place#
Worth understanding, because knowing the causes is how you stop it recurring. It's never negligence. It's that the two records have different owners and different update rituals.
| What happened | Which side got updated |
|---|---|
| New phone system, or a call-tracking number for a campaign | Usually the listing, because that's where the calls come from |
| Seasonal or holiday hours | Usually the listing, and usually not changed back |
| The website got rebuilt and page addresses changed | The site — and the listing still points at the old page |
| Moved premises, or added a second location | Both, eventually, but rarely in the same week |
| Someone claimed or edited the listing years ago | Neither, and nobody remembers who has the login |
Keeping them in step#
There's no clever system for this and anyone selling you one is overcomplicating it. Two habits cover it:
Treat the pair as one job. Any time the phone, the hours, the address or the name changes, it's not done until both are changed. Write it on whatever list you keep. The failure is never that someone refused — it's that changing one felt like finishing.
Compare them twice a year, and after anything structural. A rebuild, a move, a new phone system, a change of who answers. Ten minutes, on a phone, signed out. That's the whole discipline.
Related: why your website isn't getting you leads, which starts one step later — after someone has arrived — and a contact form people actually finish, for the step after that.