Changing your businesses contact information isn't the easy task it was in the days before online marketing and promotion.
Even after you update your contact information on your website, online
stores, etc., there are still quite a few places where old contact information can linger - causing potential confusion for your customers and colleagues.
Top 7 Hiding Places for OUTDATED Contact Info:
1. Online Press Releases - If you've had wide distribution, these are
very difficult to update. Always make sure a permanant e-mail and
web site address are inlcluded on press releases.
2. E-Books and other PDF Files - PDF files are indexed by the search
engines too, so if your PDFs are available online, any contact information
you include on these files is potentially searchable. By updating the files
with your new information, the search engines will eventaully re-index
your PDFs and show your current contact info.
3. Directory or Membership Organization Listings - These listings are
easy to forget, but generally easy to fix once you figure out where they're
located.
4. Cached versions of your web pages - If your site is not regularly indexed by the major search engines, old information could be included in the search results for a while. In most cases, this issue will correct itself within a couple of months or so.
5. Old Forgotten Web Site Pages - If your site has been around for a while, or you have a lot of pages, it's easy to miss some here and there.
6. Online Store / Payment Processor Invoices - This info is usually entered once when you first create your accounts and forgotten. It's easy to overlook updating them simply because the invoices are usually automated and your customers and clients are usually the only ones to see them. Check your PayPal, Ebay, Bank Merchant Accounts, etc.
7. Articles - If you've written articles for web distribution - and include your contact information, along with your bio in the resource box, then you could potentially have hundreds or thousands of sites displaying your outdated contact info.
The easiest way to locate your the places, sites, pages and files where your outdated contact appears is to simply type in your old info into Google - phone number, address or p.o. box number, etc., and see what comes up. You won't likely be able to correct everything, but if you find you're receiving a lot of email from customers telling you your phone number doesn't work, try placing a obvious notice on your homepage with your new phone number and address.
In our case, an old phone number was showing up on older press releases, some non-English language pages and one very old page on our site that hadn't been updated since 2004. Up until recently, there were still some pages online that listed our previous Boston office address and phone number - and we haven't been there since January 2003!
