The world would be a better place if the selling of SEO as a service was not legal, then people would produce websites that serve their customer and build their reputation to achieve status in Google.
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what good marketers try to do in this space vs the spammers (too many incompetent, spammy SEO companies sadly), and Google's intentions are generally in line with what a good business should be doing. To keep on topic here let's look at citations:
Local Citations And How They Come About
Bear in mind these citation sites (yell, yelp, google my business...) are out there anyway, and are trying to list as many businesses as they can. That's how they get in business - list lots of businesses, encourage businesses to claim their listings and then try to sell them advertising and premium listings.
Unfortunately businesses move, some central data is incorrect etc. It's pretty clear that Google's algorithms don't reward businesses who have piles of incorrect citations all over the web. Whatever their reason internally, a good business owner should fix all of these as say if someone finds you on Yelp, comes to your store, and finds it's not where you are anymore... that's not good for the customer.
So fixing all your citations (not adding hundreds of rubbish ones on sites nobody visits...) does help with your performance in local search, but it's not just something you'd do for that purpose, it's good business practice.
I don't really see banning people from helping businesses undertake good business practice as a good thing.
One Feed To Rule Them All
On the 'feeds' issue there are a number that are available, and it's true that most services simply update the name, address, and phone to the correct ones instantly for some fee. (Take a look at things like Moz Local). The reason I don't use any of them exclusively on a citation fix up is that 1. it's not that hard to do manually - I even have a free course on Tech Function magazine that shows the various steps - and 2. you get additional benefits from doing it manually.
Case Study - Those Citations Are Useful If They Look Pretty!
Take a recent client of mine in Philadelphia. We update all the listings with photos, custom descriptions, and keywords/categories optimised to the rules of the individual listings platforms (not just piling the same ones in on all platforms on a central database - though fixing central databases is also important so incorrect feed data doesn't just overwrite at some point).
After adding all the photos and rich content 1/3 of his sales come from Yelp callers now. That can't be achieved by just having the listing 'correct', the jump came after we made it all look pretty etc. Again you can do it yourself but for those that don't want to I don't see how banning people from helping would be a good idea. Especially when you think most of my clients have come to one of my seminars and courses that show them how, and they'd still rather have someone 'just do it' for them while they do their business activities.
Not All SEO Is Bad - But Make Sure It Makes Business Sense To Do 'X' Activity
The same is true across almost any aspect of SEO. There are some bad outcomes when weak companies and scammers take something that 'works' and just do it at scale until it doesn't anymore. But there are good business reasons for doing a lot of things that also boost search performance.
When I speak at events I always say that if your marketing firm can't give you good business reasons for doing things, beyond 'it'll move rankings' then most of the time (not always of course - some technical stuff is just... useful... no matter what) it's not something you want to be doing. It's like a little red flag that it might be pushing the envelope too far.
but its says 'from £30 per month' now that suggests the fee is much more, wow.
