NAP Records: The Short Version
Practitioner surveys show clean-up work pays back fastest for landscaping firms, give or take a reporting cycle. Strip away the jargon and structured listings are simply repeated, checkable facts.
The data from most clean-up projects shows the effort scales badly if it's left until a rebrand forces it. A citation is any place on the web where the website field shows up for {entity_s}. The cost of contradictory data across sources isn't a penalty; it's being silently ranked below someone tidier, once the obvious errors are gone.
Two Reasons Audits Stall
Think of business listings as the paperwork local directories check before they trust a listing, regardless of sector. Give one person the logins and one document the truth; ambiguity is what causes drift, which is why it keeps being rediscovered. Anyone who has run a bulk audit knows more than half of the problems trace back to a single unclaimed profile, assuming the basics are already in place. In practice, where the person on reception has changed twice, expect a dated address somewhere in the profile.
Listing audits repeatedly show the majority of profiles carry at least one contradiction. Handle the high-authority sources by hand and batch the long tail afterwards, if only since no one else bothers.