“Years ago I went cheap, then I went expensive only to find out the Scottish based company sub- contracted everything out back to India....”
Unfortunately hiring a UK SEO firm is no guarantee of not using off shore resource. We see literally thousands of spammy SEO listings every month, some of them supposed to be from UK based (expensive) agencies, but with Indian, Philippines or Eastern Europe IP addresses.
Because citation building is so mind numbingly boring, and the automated tools out there are so terrible, its deemed cheaper to out source.
Unfortunately, humans paid a pittance are lazy and unmotivated so "citations listings" tend to be full of typos, mistakes, wrong categories and copy and pasted content that isn't formatted or gets truncated depending which directory they are on.
The good news is it makes them easier to spot and auto delete, leaving just a few Yodas to appear on the forum who managed to sneak past our filters.