44 Locations, One Phone Number

How odd can this be?

[brycen]

My client has 44 brick & mortar physical locations, plus a customer service center that has the only phone lines.

This arrangement seems to be cheating us out of our due space in local search. It seems that data providers (Axiom, D&B, Amacai, InfoUSA, Superpages, etc) use the phone number as some sort of primary key. The customer service center shows up in searches, but the other 44 locations are invisible.

Short of getting 44 phone lines in 44 locations, is there a way to get into the local search databases?

[RossWal]

Here's a place to start. My office is in Oakland, CA. So I looked in GLocal for a bank close by. Without giving specifics, I'll just say that this particular bank may well be the best known bank of America.

Looking at the references for a few locations, it seems a unique verizon superpages is common to each listing. Also, what about the G-local xml feed, have you looked at that?

[brycen]

You're right. But notice some interesting artifacts. This data is not coming from the telcos.

BoA has a small display ad in the Oakland yellow pages, showing the central customer service number but no addresses. The Valley Yellow pages picks up just the phone number, again no addresses. The business white pages are similarly sparse.

superpages, smartpages, and yahoo contain the address of each branch, with the common phone number.
dexonline, though, shows just one branch in Oakland.

So their stragegy has partially backfired. Whatever process they use to publish their branch addresses does not work universally. Curious. Of course I'm looking for a single place to publish addresses that will subsequently flow to the dozens of individual portals.

-Bryce

PS: And reunion.com lists 10 people with the name "Bank of America". Yeah, right.

[brycen]

Note: I have a glocal business listing feed pending for several months. It is not XML -- Glocal uses tab separated spreadsheet files.

[RossWal]

Memory lapse on the XML/EXCEL feed.

A reverse lookup for our bank phone number in either InfoUSA or Smartpages shows all locations (I didn't cross check them one-by-one... could be interesting). My guess is that Smartpages has an enhanced listing. Maybe infoUSA too, or maybe that's being picked up from SmartPages.

No one else is commenting?

[moltar]

Yes, indeed, some phone numbers return multiple subsets of addresses including other, more specific phone numbers. So I guess the phone database is not as "flat" as we thought about it.

[brycen]

Yeah, I found a large bank at 510-649-6600 returns a bunch of locations, all from Acxiom data. These listings appear to have been keypunched from the Oakland Business White Pages.

Which brings up the question... which data aggregators keypunch which directories? Do the data aggregators get tapes from the old baby-bell ILEC's, and therefore skip keypunching those directories? And do they keypunch the off-brand directories?

I'm still seeking a way to get the 44 locations listed reliably and quickly.