Picture a hypothetical hotel whose own website uses one name, one booking site adds a brand prefix, another drops the street suffix, and Google shows a fourth version with a different front desk number. No single listing is badly wrong, yet a guest searching late at night cannot tell which one to trust. This guide fixes that in a set order: a record first, then each field, then an audit across every channel.
Write one canonical record before touching any channel
Open a plain document and describe the property as it exists in the real world: the name on the sign, the street address a delivery driver would use, the number the front desk answers, and the hours when someone is actually present. Every listing gets corrected toward this record, so nobody has to guess later which version is right.
Then list every place where the property appears:
- Your own website and its booking engine
- Each online travel agency listing
- Your channel manager and property management exports
- The brand or franchisor page for the property, if there is one
- Your Google Business Profile
- Social, map and directory profiles
Each channel reaches the same guest at a different moment: one shows photos, another a phone number, a third directions. Any of them can carry an outdated detail, because few teams reopen a listing after its first setup.
Name: match the sign, not the channel
Use the name guests see on the building and at check-in. Google asks for the real-world name of the business, so avoid adding the city, a star rating or a word such as downtown unless it is part of the sign. For a franchised hotel, copy the exact brand and property wording the franchisor requires on signage.
Some channels apply their own display format. Do not chase those. Record the variant as an accepted difference, and fix only what you control: the name field in your channel manager, your website footer and your profile.
Address: one format, and the entrance guests actually use
- Write the address the way a postal carrier would accept it: street number and name, suite or building if any, city, state abbreviation and ZIP code.
- Copy that exact text into your website footer, your channel manager and each booking listing, including punctuation and the way you abbreviate street types.
- On the profile, check that the map marker sits on the guest entrance, not on the service entrance or the middle of a large property.
- For a corner or campus property with two street addresses, use the one on your signage and mention the other in the description.
Phone: decide which number answers a guest at the curb
A hotel usually has at least two numbers: the front desk line and a central reservations line, sometimes a toll-free one. Make the number that reaches a person at the property the primary phone, and add the reservations line as an additional number if the profile accepts it. If a channel shows a number you do not recognize, find out who owns it before it spreads to other listings.
Hours follow the same logic. If the front desk is staffed around the clock, say so on the profile. If not, list the hours when a person answers, and add special hours for holidays ahead of time. Check-in and check-out times belong in the lodging fields Google offers, if your profile shows them.
Audit every channel in this order
- Open each listing in a private browser window, logged out, as a guest would see it.
- Compare name, address, phone and hours with the canonical record, field by field.
- Fix at the source: the channel manager first, then the website, then each channel directly.
- Note every change with its date in the record.
- Recheck after the next channel update, rebrand, renovation or phone system change.
Keep the details from drifting
Drift usually starts with small edits: a phone system change, a franchise rebrand, a suggested edit from a third party. According to Google’s help from September 2026, the owner is notified of certain suggested edits and has four days to accept or reject them, and Google may publish an edit backed by public information. Guardian, an optional LocalEdge add-on, checks the profile hourly through the Google API and sends an alert within the hour, with the field, the old value and the new one.
You can check your profile with LocalEdge Lite, which includes a 15-day Guardian trial, and map your visibility with LocalEdge heatmap scans in LocalEdge Solo. A group that runs several hotels can manage every property from the agency plan. For the wider context, read our complete guide to US local SEO.
A profile that matches the sign, the website and the booking sites gives a guest fewer reasons to hesitate, though no ranking is promised. Get your free GBP Score with LocalEdge Lite and compare it with your record today.
