What to do when a client changes address

A client emails on a Friday: "We're moving next month, can you update the website?"

The website is the easy part. The problem is the forty other places their old address is sitting — most of which neither of you has thought about since you created them, some of which were created by someone else entirely.

Get the order wrong and you spend the next six months with customers arriving at an empty building.

Do this before the move, not after

The instinct is to wait until they've moved. Resist it.

Two to four weeks out, audit what exists. Search the old address in quotes, search the phone number in quotes, and work out how many listings carry the address that's about to be wrong. This is the same fingerprint technique that finds duplicate listings, and you'll want the full inventory before you start changing anything.

Write the list down. You will not remember all of them, and the free ways of finding existing listings will surface ones nobody knew about.

While you're auditing, be clear on what actually counts as an inconsistency — a move is the moment to fix real problems, not to normalise "Street" to "St" across forty sites.

One week out, update the website first. Every other listing you touch will be checked against it, and a directory that finds a mismatch between its own record and the site is more likely to flag or reject the change.

Update the site's address, its LocalBusiness schema if it has any, the contact page, the footer, and any embedded map.

Then Google, and take the disruption

On the day, not before, update Google Business Profile.

This one is worth understanding because it will worry your client. Changing the address on a GBP usually triggers re-verification — postcard, video, or phone depending on the profile. During that window the listing can lose visibility, and its position in the map pack may not come straight back.

That's not something you can avoid, and it is not a sign you've done it wrong. A profile that changes address without re-verifying would be a profile anyone could hijack.

Two things reduce the damage:

• Don't change anything else at the same time. Not the name, not the primary category, not the phone. One significant edit is a normal business event; three at once looks like an account takeover.
• Update the hours and post something once it's live again. Activity signals the profile is real and attended to.

Then everything else, in order of weight

Once Google is done, work the rest of the list. Order matters less than completeness here, but roughly:

1. Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Both feed maps people actually use, and Apple in particular is the one agencies forget.
2. Yelp, Facebook, BBB. High-visibility, and all three are places a customer might check.
3. Data aggregators, if the vertical uses them.
4. The trade-specific directories. Chambers, trade bodies, supplier locators, manufacturer "find an installer" pages. These are usually the highest-quality links the business has, and they are almost always updated by email rather than a form.
5. Everything else on the list from step one.

The last group is where this job goes wrong. It's tedious, none of it feels urgent, and there's no dashboard telling you which are still stale.

The old address is the part everyone skips

Here's the thing that catches people out. Updating a listing and creating a new listing are not the same action, and directories differ on which one you've done.

Some update in place. Some create a new record and leave the old one live. You end up with two listings — one correct, one not — which is the most expensive problem in local SEO and the single most common way it starts.

So two weeks after the move, go back and check every listing you touched. Search the old address in quotes again. Anything still carrying it is either a listing you missed or a duplicate you accidentally created.

If it's a duplicate, merge toward whichever has the reviews.

If the move is across town

One more thing worth flagging to the client, because they'll ask.

A move of a few streets is usually invisible in the rankings. A move across a city — or into a different suburb — is not. Proximity is a real ranking factor in local search, and a business that moves ten miles is competing in a different area against different competitors.

That's not a citation problem and no amount of listing hygiene fixes it. It's worth saying out loud before the move rather than explaining it afterwards, when it looks like an excuse.

Keep the record somewhere

The reason a move is painful is that nobody has a list of where the business is listed. It's in someone's head, or spread across a spreadsheet, an old agency's handover doc, and forty accounts with forgotten passwords.

If you've just inherited this client from another agency, do the access work before the move rather than during it — requesting ownership of a Google profile takes seven days you won't have.

Keep one record of the business's name, address and phone, and keep a list of every place it's published. Then a move is an afternoon of work rather than six months of surprises.

That's what Placemark is for — one record, a list of every listing built from it, and a scan that tells you which ones still disagree. Free for one business.