Most of the effort in moving a business goes into the move itself — the lease, the fit-out, the week of chaos where nothing is where you left it. The part that catches people out comes afterwards, when the shop is open and quiet, and it turns out half the internet still thinks you’re in the old town.
This is a checklist for that. It’s not complicated, but the order matters and there’s one piece of bad news up front.
You don’t take your local rankings with you
If you’ve spent years quietly ranking well for “physio in Takaka”, you don’t arrive in Nelson with that. Local search is geographic. In the new town you’re starting roughly where a new business starts, and the incumbents there have a head start you don’t have.
That’s worth knowing before you move rather than discovering three months in and assuming something is broken. Nothing is broken. You’ve moved markets.
The useful question is whether you’re leaving the old one. Plenty of businesses move town but keep serving their old customers — that’s a different setup to a clean break, and worth deciding deliberately rather than by accident. If you’re keeping both, say so clearly everywhere. If you’re not, let the old place go properly rather than leaving half-updated listings behind to confuse things.
Do this first: your Google Business Profile
This is the single most important one, and it’s also the one people most often get wrong.
Edit your existing profile. Do not create a new one. Google is explicit about this — a change of location is not a reason for a new profile. Your existing listing carries your reviews and your history, and when you change the address on it, Google transfers your reviews across automatically. Create a fresh listing instead and you start from zero stars while your old listing sits there competing with you.
Expect to re-verify. Changing an address usually triggers it, sometimes by postcard, which means factoring in a wait. Do this when you’re actually operating from the new address, not when you sign the lease — an address that doesn’t check out yet is a slower path than one that does.
While you’re in there, update the service area if you have one, and the opening hours if they’ve changed.
Then: everywhere else your address appears
The aim is that every source saying where you are says the same thing. Search engines and AI tools weigh consistency heavily, and a handful of stale listings can outvote your own website.
Work through:
- Your website — contact page, footer (it’s usually on every page), the embedded map, any “areas we serve” copy, page titles, and the About page story
- Apple Business Connect — powers Apple Maps and Siri, and gets forgotten almost universally
- Bing Places — small audience directly, but Bing’s index feeds some AI assistants
- Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn — the About sections, not just a post
- Yellow, Neighbourly, and any industry association or trade body directory you’re listed in
- Your Companies Office registered address, if it’s changed
- Any directory you paid for once and forgot
Then the unglamorous ones nobody lists: email signature, invoice template, quote template, letterhead, vehicle signage, business cards, the PDF price list someone downloaded two years ago, and the automatic reply on your contact form.
Do the sweep in a short window rather than dribbling it out over months. A consistent set of sources updated in one go reads as a move. A half-updated set spread over a year reads as noise.
Write a “we’ve moved” page and keep it
One dated page saying where you were, where you are now, when you moved, and whether you still serve the old area. Link to it from your homepage for a few months.
It costs you twenty minutes and it’s the clearest possible signal to anything trying to work out what happened to you — including a customer who’s just driven to your old address.
The AI assistants will take longer
If people ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about your business, expect those answers to lag. They’re slower than Google to let go of what they already believe, and there’s no form to fill in to correct them.
The only real lever is the one above: make the correct information unambiguous and repeated across enough sources that it becomes the obvious answer. That includes the machine-readable layer on your own website — the part visitors never see, which states your address as a fact rather than as text in a paragraph. On most sites it’s either missing or still says the old address long after the visible page has been updated.
It’s not instant. Businesses that do the sweep properly are usually looking right within a few months. Businesses that don’t can be wrong for a year or more.
If you’d like a hand
Send us your web address and the two towns, and we’ll tell you what’s currently out there saying where you are — what’s right, what’s stale, and what’s worth bothering with. No charge, and if it’s all in order we’ll tell you that instead.