Everything in this course assumes one thing: that you know what the correct answer is. Most practices do not have that written down anywhere. Ask three staff members for the official practice name and you will often get three answers. This lesson fixes that, and it is the highest-return hour in the whole curriculum.
Why you need one record
Without a defined truth, every listing update is a guess. Someone fixes a directory from memory, someone else fixes another from an old letterhead, and you have created inconsistency while trying to remove it.
A single source of truth gives you three things: a definition of correct, a way to check any listing without debate, and a way to onboard staff or an agency without transferring folklore.
What to record per office
One row per staffed office, with these fields fixed in the exact form they should appear everywhere:
- Practice name, exactly as on signage, with no treatment keywords.
- Street address, including suite, with your chosen formatting.
- City, state, postal code.
- Main phone number, the one that rings the practice.
- Fax, if you still publish one.
- Public email address.
- Website URL for that office page, not the homepage.
- Hours, meaning when someone actually answers.
- Holiday closures.
- Primary and secondary categories.
- Services offered at that office specifically.
- Accepted insurance plans.
- Accessibility facts.
- Opening date.
- Geographic coordinates of the entrance patients should use.
- Short and long descriptions, pre-approved for compliance.
- Clinicians at that office, with NPI and credentials.
The last two matter more than they look. Pre-approved description text means staff never improvise copy into a directory field, which is how efficacy claims sneak into listings nobody reviews.
Decide the ambiguous cases once
Most inconsistency comes from small unresolved choices. Settle them now and write down the decision:
- Suite or Ste, and whether it goes on address line one or two.
- Whether the name includes a legal suffix such as LLC or PLLC in public listings.
- Whether you use an ampersand or the word and.
- Phone formatting.
- Whether the URL includes www.
- How a doctor name is written, with or without credentials.
None of these individually decides your rankings. Collectively, having no answer is what produces four variants of your address across the web.
Where to keep it
A spreadsheet is entirely adequate to start, provided it has one owner and a change log. Whatever you use, it needs three properties:
- One owner who is accountable for accuracy.
- A change log, recording what changed, when, and why. This is what lets you attribute later performance shifts honestly.
- A listing inventory: every platform where you have a record, the URL, who owns the login, and the date last verified.
That inventory is the piece practices skip, and it is why nobody can ever answer the question of how many directories they are actually on.
Making it stick
A source of truth that is not used is just a document. Three habits keep it alive:
- Change flows one way. Update the record first, then propagate to listings. Never edit a listing directly and hope to remember.
- Any operational change triggers a review. New hours, a new plan accepted, a clinician leaving, new signage.
- A quarterly audit against the record, using the checklist in chapter ten.
This is unglamorous administrative work that quietly determines whether any of the rest succeeds. The next lesson covers the field that causes the most trouble: your practice name.