4.1. Local Directories and Citations

One minute on why your business name must be identical everywhere. Details begin below.

The exact string, not “the right data”

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone. Consistency doesn't just mean all three are correct: it means the exact text string matches everywhere. "Av. Luis Vega y Monroy 405" and "Avenida Luis Vega y Monroy #405" are two different businesses to the algorithm, just like "442 123 4567" and "+52 442 123 4567". Lock in a single format—one business name, one street abbreviation, one phone format—and copy-paste it every single time.

The canonical name is the one on your storefront. Google requires the profile name to be the real one—the one on the shop window—and prohibits slogans, ® symbols, phone numbers, URLs, and keywords in that field. “Pizzería Forno — The best pizza in Querétaro” is grounds for suspension and spreads that fabricated variation to the other twenty directories.

The order of attack

1. The primary sources that feed the rest

Google Business Profile —it is no longer called Google My Business, it goes on the lesson 3.1—, Apple Business, and Foursquare. Apple retired Business Connect in April 2026 and rolled it into Apple Business, free in over 200 countries including Mexico: it's what Siri, Spotlight, and Apple Maps see. Foursquare shut down its app in December 2024, but claiming your listing is still free at business.foursquare.com, and its data powers Apple Maps, Uber, and several AI assistants.

2. Consumer directories

Yelp Mexico can be claimed for free at biz.yelp.com/claim, Tripadvisor at tripadvisor.com.mx/Owners, and Sección Amarilla at seccionamarilla.com.mx/registra-tu-empresa. The Sección Amarilla form asks for your trade name, latitude and longitude, full address, zip code, business category, website, logo, and business hours: use it as a template for your canonical NAP data. In Querétaro, almost nobody claims Yelp or Tripadvisor, so those listings end up carrying data uploaded by total strangers.

Waze is handled separately: there is no free dashboard. waze.com/business redirects to paid Waze Ads. What is free is editing the business directly from the app or at waze.com/editor; if the area is locked, you submit the edit and a local editor approves it.

3. Official records

Free, indexable, and almost nobody uses them. The National Tourism Registry is mandatory for restaurants under the "Food and Beverages" category: you register within 30 days of opening, and the certificate is valid for 2 years; the public directory is at rnt-consulta.sectur.gob.mx. The SIEM, mandatory under Article 30 of the Business Chambers Law, publishes your listing at siem.economia.gob.mx. And INEGI's DENUE already lists you: if it shows an old address, fix it using "Update your establishment's information"; that bad data poisons every audit and cannot be resolved from any marketing dashboard.

All three ask for a URL, and without your own website, that field stays blank.

4. What actually costs money

CANIRAC charges an annual membership fee based on capacity, from $2,700 for a micro business of 1 to 16 people up to $8,950 for 121 or more, with SIEM registration processing included. Access via portal.canirac.org.mx: caniracqueretaro.org does not resolve.

Delivery aggregators are free to join and charge a commission per order: Uber Eats at merchants.ubereats.com/mx/es, Rappi at merchants.rappi.com/es-mx/restaurants —activated in 5 days with complete documentation and at least 15 products with images larger than 360x360 px— and DiDi Food at didi-food.com/es-MX/store, which remains active in Mexico. If your name on Rappi includes "(Sucursal Centro)" and on Google it doesn't, you just created a second business.

How to audit what's already broken

• Search Google for your business name in quotation marks, and separately, your phone number. Write down each listing: URL, displayed name, address, and phone number.
• Open those listings one by one and compare them against your canonical string.
• Cross-reference with official registries: RNT, SIEM, and DENUE.
• In your Business Profile, check for edits suggested by third parties and pending duplicates.

The mistakes are always the same five: duplicate profiles for the same location, pre-move addresses lingering on forgotten directories, phone numbers forwarding to a call center (Google requires the business to control the number), keywords stuffed into the business name, and P.O. boxes or virtual offices used as the physical address.

What to expect

Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors report, led by Darren Shaw, keeps citation consistency and completeness among its weighted factors. It publishes the results as a chart, not a table: anyone quoting an exact percentage is making it up.

Cleaning up twenty listings takes an afternoon of inventory and weeks waiting for verifications. If you prefer to be in the kitchen, that audit is included in the SEO service, with tracking set up in marketing automation, within the monthly plan. With the data aligned, the next push is reviews.