Spoke
Yelp, directories and vertical platforms
The platforms beyond Google each serve a different audience. Between them, they're where your old address, your old phone number and your old firm name are still being published to anyone who looks.
That directory listings corroborate or contradict facts about a company follows from how machines identify things. Which platform matters most varies by category, and that part is judgment.
Google is the biggest reputation surface for most businesses. It isn't the only one anybody reads.
The others matter for two reasons that are easy to run together. Some get read by your prospects. Nearly all of them get read by machines assembling facts about your firm.
The second reason applies even to the platforms you think are irrelevant.
Which review platforms besides Google are worth the effort?
The ones your buyers use, which depends on what you do. Yelp and the big consumer directories for local consumer services. Vertical and professional directories for regulated work, where a bar or board listing frequently beats a general platform on a search for your name.
Every other listing still needs claiming and correcting — but as housekeeping, not reputation work. What they publish about you either backs up what you say or contradicts it.
Two jobs, not one
Reputation. A prospect reads reviews on the platform they already trust. Worth real effort on a handful of platforms and nothing at all on the rest.
Corroboration. Every listing asserts a name, an address, a phone number and a description. Anything trying to work out who you are reads whatever it finds. Agreement across all of them is what produces confidence.
That second job is cheap, boring, and skipped almost universally. It's also the one with a clear mechanism behind it.
Before you build a process, read the rules
Platforms differ, sometimes sharply, on whether you're allowed to ask for reviews at all.
Google's habit of actively requesting them is not a universal norm. Some platforms discourage solicitation and some prohibit it outright, and they'll filter or penalize listings that do it anyway.
Running one process across every platform because it works on Google is a reliable way to get your reviews suppressed everywhere else. Read each platform's own policy first. This is one of the few corners of search marketing where the rules are written down plainly and nobody reads them.
The audit worth an afternoon
- Search your own name and note every third-party listing in the first several pages.
- Search your old addresses and phone numbers. This is the step that surfaces the stale listings, which is the whole point.
- For each one: claim it, correct the name, address, phone and description against your official record, and kill the duplicates.
- Write down the official version so the next person doesn't have to reconstruct it from scratch.
- Do it again next year. Listings decay, aggregators repopulate them, and somebody always creates a duplicate.
Step two is where you find real damage. Businesses move and nobody thinks to tell the directories.
Duplicates
A duplicate listing splits your reviews across two records, sends prospects to the wrong page, and creates exactly the ambiguity that entity work exists to remove.
They show up through mergers, office moves, aggregator feeds, and well-meaning staff creating a listing that already existed. Finding them means going and looking rather than waiting to be told, and merging them is usually a tedious support ticket rather than a button.
What this isn't
It isn't a reason to buy a listing-management subscription for a business with one office. For one location, the audit above is an afternoon a year.
Those tools earn their keep at real multi-office scale, where the math changes completely. That's multi-location.
More in Reviews & reputation
Google reviews
For most local businesses this is the biggest reputation asset there is, and most run it as an occasional push rather than a process. What the signals are, what a working system looks like, and which widely sold tactics are illegal.
Responding to reviews
Your reply to a bad review is read by every prospect who scrolls that far, and it's often more persuasive than the praise above it. For a law firm it's also where a confidentiality breach is most likely to happen.
Fake reviews & removal
What to do about a review that's fraudulent, from a competitor, or just untrue — and the far more common situation where your real reviews are being filtered out and nobody told you.
Reddit & communities
Forum threads turn up constantly in search results and AI answers, which makes them a reputation surface whether you show up or not. They're also where faking it fails most publicly.
Glassdoor & employer reputation
Employer-review sites matter for hiring. The widely repeated claim that they're becoming a search ranking factor has nothing behind it. Both halves of that are worth saying out loud.
Review schema
Marking up reviews you collected about yourself, on your own site, is specifically not eligible for rich results. That single rule explains most of the review markup in the wild, and why it does nothing.
Multi-location reviews
What works for one office falls apart at twelve. The hard parts are knowing which office a review belongs to, giving each one an owner, and stopping head office writing all the replies.