Correcting Map Errors

One the top reasons potential patients search for your practice online is to see where you are located.  Being difficult to find (or perhaps nowhere at all) is something you want to avoid at all costs.  For this reason, its essential that you search for your practice on as many search engines and smart phones as you can.  You’ll want to check that the address is correct, that any markers accurately reflect your physical location and that your listing appears as you would like it to.

But what if there are errors?  Here are steps you can take to make sure that your map listings are corrected:

If you have a problem that seems to be an issue with the location not matching the address, a search for your practice on Google or Mapquest will return the correct address (street number, name, city and state) but the location associated with that address is incorrect.  This would likely also affect many GPS units.  So someone putting the address into their GPS could end up in the wrong location even though they have the correct address.  This means the problem is with MAPPING rather than an issue with the listing iteself (Google, Mapquest, etc.)

Google, Mapquest and nearly every other service both online and off, get their business and address information from two major mapping data sources.  You will need to report the mapping error to TeleAtlas and NAVTEQ.  These two companies provide the map data to nearly every online service and GPS in the world.  Almost everyone else gets their mapping data from them.

They both have report-a-mapping-problem links on their web sites where you can register a complaint with them.

http://mapinsight.teleatlas.com and http://mapreporter.navteq.com.

It may also help to have a GPS device that shows exact latitude and longitude that you can use to accurately report the error.  Most handheld GPS devices provide this information, as do boating GPS devices and some car units as well.  Many smartphones, including the iPhone and Galaxy also show latitude and longitude data.

It can take a while for these issues to correct themselves. Some mapping software companies produce updates only every few years.   For services such as Google and Mapquest, these updates are made more frequently, but still may take time to show corrections.

If the problem is that your address is not showing up correctly you will want to claim each listing that needs changing and then work to submit changes.  This is something that you can do yourself, but we offer a substantial discount over what anyone else charges to update these listings so you may want to consider our local search services.