Remember the big old directories or the frequent suggestions from relatives or neighbors regarding “a good doctor” in town? The big directories and verbal references are now replaced by online directories and other platforms that store your phone number. These are important because better NAP SEO accounts for more customers from the locality.
Updating NAP SEO makes you more visible on the local search results. That’s why it’s so important to regularly update information on the Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) of your business all across the internet. And your job doesn’t end there— you need to optimize all listings and manage all discrepancies occurring in them from time to time.
This entails understanding the significance of NAP with regard to search engine optimization and adopting an effective strategy accordingly. Don’t worry— we’ve explained it all in our comprehensive guide to NAP SEO.
So, to know how it’s done, read on!
What Is NAP?
The term NAP refers to the Name, Address, and Phone Number. It implies the fundamental information displayed about a business on the website that’s listing it. Do note that the three items, i.e., the name, address, and phone number, are the first information people look online when they are interested in your products or services. Hence, updating the correct NAP is one of the fundamental measures of local SEO efforts.
To help your business achieve a higher rank organically at the time of a local search, you’ll need to pay attention to optimizing your NAP consistently. Maintaining consistency in your NAP details involves considering quite a few critical factors and devoting individual attention to improving upon each of them.
Understanding NAP Consistency
Consistency of NAP data refers to keeping the business name, address, and phone number accurate and identical across all platforms. Be it on your website, social media pages or on the directory listings, you NAP should be the same.
The reason is, when potential customers view different information about a single business, it confuses them. As a result, your brand might miss out on sales. Another reason is, when it comes to search engines, detailing is an extremely important aspect. Keeping NAP data consistent is much more than just verifying the basic facts about a business.
Here are a few steps you can take to maintain consistency in your NAP details throughout:
- Create a Google Business Profile listing and verify your business address.
- Claim your business listing on other local directories such as Foursquare, Bing Places for Business, and Yelp.
- Make sure your NAP is consistent on your website. This includes your contact page, homepage, and other pages where your NAP is displayed.
- Use the same NAP format across all your listings- the format includes aspects such as capitalization, spacing, and punctuation.
In case you’re not sure how to check your NAP consistency, you can utilize tools such as the NAP checker offered by Google My Business.
While NAP consistency is significant for local SEO, it isn’t the sole factor affecting your SERP rankings. You should equally stress building backlinks, effectively optimizing your website, and content marketing.
Why Is NAP Consistency Vital For SEO?
Maintaining consistency in your NAP is among the significant local SEO tips experts give for better search rankings. The NAP details play a crucial role in keeping your business ahead of other local competitors. In case we haven’t enumerated enough, let us delve into why NAP SEO is vital for your business’s online visibility.
Here are four main reasons why NAP is crucial to keep up the digital presence of your business.
- Impacts Visibility
The first reason is that the NAP consistency directly impacts the visibility of your business in Google’s Local Pack and the local search results. The search algorithm takes into account different factors, including the consistency and accuracy of the business’s NAP data across various online platforms.
So, when you build citations on Google Business Profile and other platforms that incorporate consistent NAP, you can influence local rankings positively.
- Improves User Experience
NAP consistency is also important for providing the right user experience to your prospects. User experience, in turn, affects local SEO significantly since it has a direct impact on your performance and credibility in the SERP rankings.
User engagement and website credibility are other significant areas where NAP consistency helps. This leads to enhanced customer loyalty, encourages positive reviews, and boosts local search rankings.
- Increases Relevance
No matter which industry or niche a business belongs to, it needs to establish its relevance and legitimacy, and NAP consistency can be of great help in this regard. Inconsistent and inaccurate NAP data is most likely to confuse Google and other search engines. And this can make it difficult for them to correlate a company with its services and physical location. Web users might as well be confused when they come across multiple NAP information about one brand.
Hence, to deliver the best results to users, search engines might choose other businesses that provide more trustworthy information when showcasing search results. This can negatively impact the rankings of the concerned business.
- Categorizes And Indexes A Business
Keeping your NAP details consistent throughout your listings can raise its chances of featuring in the local search results. That’s because it improves your visibility online and is able to fetch more traffic, including prospects actively searching for your services or products.
For instance, if you run a toy shop in New Jersey, using consistent NAP details across different platforms can help search engines recognize that your business is located in New Jersey. That’s why your business will be more likely to appear in the search results when someone from New Jersey searches with the keyword “toy shops near me.”
8 Strategies to Optimize Your NAP SEO
Without further delay, let’s move on to knowing the best optimization strategies to apply to ensure the effectiveness of your NAP data :
- Conducting A NAP Audit
The foremost step you can take to rule out inconsistencies in your NAP data is to audit it on a regular basis.
Conduct a plain manual audit of the three key details of your business, namely, the name, address, and phone number, across all the listings you’ve created on the internet. This entails checking each page of the website to verify its consistency and accuracy.
The process needs business owners to have ample patience and the ability to scan all the details effectively. After all, the smallest discrepancy can affect your SEO performance and ultimately diminish online visibility.
You should also make sure that the audit isn’t restricted to your Google Business profile and website but extends to all its listings on the internet. These include brand mentions on social media, different online directories, and review websites. Ultimately, business owners can ensure they’re presenting accurate information about the business on all platforms.
A faster way of conducting an effective audit of the NAP details is to use an automated resource like the Local Marketing Tool from SE Ranking. This can enhance the efficiency of the process and ensure better accuracy of the results.
Such tools quickly scan the website and other listings to point out errors or inconsistencies in the NAP details that might be impacting the search engine rankings. Ultimately, you obtain an overview of the online presence of the business and can implement local SEO strategies more effectively.
If you have stores in multiple locations, ensure that the location for each of the stores has accurate and consistent information. This helps search engines understand that your business operates in multiple locations and shows results accordingly.
- Maintaining Schema Markup
Schema Markup can play a significant role in local SEO— it helps maintain consistency in the NAP data by making search engines index and understand business information in a better way.
The following are some key factors you’ll need to take into account while handling the schema markup for your NAP details:
- Structuring of data
Schema markup is basically structured data used to enable search engines to interpret website content effectively. Applying schema markup for a local business adds to the methods for conveying accurate information about your NAP details.
This makes the business more accessible to Google and other search engines, helping them to index business information accurately and in a prominent manner.
- Schema for Local Business
Google suggests applying the Local Business schema to showcase the business name and NAP information. This includes properties such as address, name, URL, and telephone, which can be used accurately to explain the contact details of a business.
- Recommended And Compulsory Properties
While there are mandatory fields in the Local Business schema, such as the telephone, address, and name, others are optional. As such, when you include relevant properties, you can enhance Google’s understanding of the business and improve your visibility in local search results.
- JSON-LD Format
While all schema formats are suitable for local businesses, Google recommends applying the JSON-LD schema to ensure the data is thoroughly structured. Such a format is easier to maintain in relation to other relevant formats like RDFa or Microdata. On the whole, you should ensure that there are no issues with the structured data till when the markup is valid and is being implemented properly.
- Validating And Testing
Before you implement schema markup on the website, ensure that you use the Structured Data Testing Tool from Google or the Rich Results Test to ensure your markup is validated. This process also helps identify potential errors in the markup and makes it easily understood by any search engine.
- Optimizing Your Website
The website of a business can pretty well be called its face, and it is being viewed by the online world, including search engines and target audience. As such, you’ll have to get every detail right to ensure the visibility of your website is at par with the set standards.
Begin by verifying whether the data in your paperwork aligns with that on your site. This includes making sure that the NAP info is consistent and correct, including spelling and formatting.
In the case of a local business, we’d advise showing the company’s NAP details in both the footer and header of the website. The only precaution you’ll need to take is to ensure both match so that your NAP data is shown on all pages of your website.
After all, a search engine never indexes websites as a whole but scans a single web page.
Another crucial step in this regard is to display the NAP information prominently on the website. This ensures both search engines and users can access it easily. You should ideally include NAP details on the About US and Content page section, as those are the primary areas that users check for contact details.
Additionally, incorporating NAP data on the website footer ensures it’s visible across every page and ultimately enhances accessibility.
Certain businesses even choose to include NAP information in the website header. While this isn’t a mandatory practice, it has been shown to improve user experience and enhance visibility. When you place the contact details at the top of every page, this can make them easily accessible to users. That said, you’ll need to make sure the information is consistent with what is displayed in the website footer.
When you’re able to strategically place NAP information on the website, it can help create a seamless experience and increase the chances of search engines indexing the business. Accessibility and consistency are key when it comes to displaying the NAP data, so make sure you keep such factors in mind, as that can help optimize the website for local SEO.
- Updating Business Listings And Directories
It’s worth listing a business on national, local, and industry-focussed platforms to obtain more citations and traffic.
There are three types of directories for which you can obtain NAP citations:
- National Directories
National-level directories are perfect for obtaining more citations owing to the high traffic inflow they generate. That said, the audience that they cater to might not be highly targeted like that of local directories.
It’s only when the right individuals get to view the listings that they utilize them just the way they use local ones.
- Local Directories
Local directories are connected to the region or city where a business operates, and they list the relevant ones. When you get listed in such directories, you are able to reinforce the fact that search engines do exist and provide local information in a clear manner.
- International Directories
If you want to see your business at the zenith, then updating your NAP on some international directories like DMOZ is imperative. It helps demographic cohorts from several parts of the word discover your business. If you view the world as your oyster, you should be game for this NAP strategy.
- Leverage Industry- Focussed Directories
Industry-focussed directories generally provide niche-specific and regional listings. Do note that you might find it difficult to come across one of these directories depending on the niche your business lies in.
However, once you’re able to find one, you should try to get listed in it. This will ensure your business appears in the search results for several service queries like repairs, grooming, plumbing, and more.
Some of the significant directories to apply for your listings include Yelp, here, Foursquare, Facebook, Bing, TomTom, Uber Eats, Just Landed, MapQuest, and Tripadvisor.
Apart from the core details, you also ought to keep a check on elements like the logo, employee strength, social media profiles, working horse and more. Just verify whether the information is consistent with that provided in the official papers and on your profile on Google Business profile.
- Optimizing Google Business Profile
Owing to the supremacy that Google enjoys in the world of search engines, tons of people are applying it to search for services and products. These include the ones your business is offering.
Now, your ultimate aim is to get search engines to trust the NAP data for your business. That’s why you’ll have to ensure the accuracy of the information on the page that Google considers extracting it from— your profile on Google My Business.
For the verified GBP account, you should ensure the name, address, and phone number are listed just the way they appear in the official registration documents and the website. After this, all you need to do is update the NAP data if it doesn’t match the latter.
When Google verifies a business, its correct NAP data will be shown in the Local Pack of the search engine at the time of a search query for the company. What’s left is applying some additional SEO tricks that can further contribute to improving your local search rankings.
- Monitoring Social Media Performance
At the time of creating business listings in online directories and other platforms, you’re likely to be asked to enter the links to your social media profiles.
Now, as most social media platforms nowadays are no less than forums for distributing information, you’ll want to maintain consistency in the NAP details for them, too. This is to ensure that the NAP data across all such platforms aligns perfectly with your website information.
Here’s how keeping a tab on your social media activities can help in effective NAP optimization:
- Tracking Mentions of NAP on Social Media
Tracking brand mentions across social media is an important local SEO strategy. By monitoring social media, you can track the various brand mentions. You can identify instances of brand promotion by these NAP mentions and outreach the source for placing a website link if you think fit.
- Addressing Customer Feedback On NAP
Customer reviews and feedback on brands play an important role. In fact, according to data, 77% of people give high importance to online reviews. They take into consideration what people are saying about your brand and then decide about visiting the store.
Hence, ignoring a few negative remarks regarding your business can be costly for your brand. Addressing customers in a calm and collected manner is important. Also, if you are the one at fault, then do everything in your power to correct it for a better brand positioning.
- Providing Insights Into User Engagement
When your target audience finds the NAP valuable and clicks on it, it signals a positive engagement. When your NAP information gets less user engagement, it means that you need to optimize the NAP SEO further.
You will get useful data regarding your customer’s perception of your brand when you analyze the user engagement. Once you collect these valuable insights, you can formulate data-driven strategies for SERP traction.
- Being Consistent with NAP Across Multiple Locations
In case a business operates from multiple locations, it’s a must to maintain consistency in the information for every location across the platforms where the business is listed.
For instance, for a Korean restaurant with branches in both Las Vegas and New York, you’ll need to maintain consistent and separate NAP information for every location. This will ensure the New York branch of the restaurant shows up when a person searches for Korean restaurants in the city.
Additionally, you’ll need to target keywords for your local listings and website to ensure proper visibility of your business on all platforms. This keyword targeting can either be based on the market or business location you’re targeting.
If your customers need to visit a physical location to avail of your services, you should target keywords based only on the business location. This will ensure you’re able to attract customers located nearby who are likely to come to your store. When you’re creating a GBP listing, you’ll need to provide the real physical address irrespective of the area you’re catering to. This step is crucial to approve and verify the process.
In case you operate from two separate locations, update the GBP business information accordingly. Ensure to provide the address and phone number for both locations to upgrade your NAP SEO. Providing accurate information can actually bring customers to your in-front store.
Frequently Asked Questions
While managing their NAP SEO activities, businesses might end up making a few faux passes. Some of the common mistakes in:
i. Failing to update NAP information at the time of a change
ii. Not verifying their Google My Business profile
iii. Using acronyms or abbreviations in their NAP details
iv. Adopting different business names on various channels.
You’ll need to update the NAP data for your business whenever your business, phone number, or address is changed. Also, an update becomes essential in case any consistencies are observed.
A couple of tools are available if you wish to track the performance of your NAP SEO:
i. Moz Local
ii. Whitespark’s NAP Checker
iii. Yext
iv. Local Falcon
Marketers in the US use four major data aggregators to check NAP consistency, namely, factual, Data Axle, Foursquare, and Neustar. These can very well be considered a database for most businesses in the country. With a little effort, you can obtain the business data in these aggregators and set up an account to provide input for the data that are incorrect.
If you discover inconsistencies in the NAP, refer to your official paperwork and update the affected business listing accordingly. You can also reach out to other websites or platforms requesting them to update the listing as per the correct information. On a side note, make sure to prioritize critical platforms as they impact search rankings and online visibility to the maximum possible extent.
A Few Words Before Wrapping Up
While NAP consistency can be a hard nut to crack initially, it can work wonders in improving your local SEO rankings if you master the art successfully.
In fact, while many factors in local search aren’t easy to control, NAP consistency is an aspect you can easily tap into. Make sure that it’s a part of your recurring marketing initiatives, and improve your NAP SEO parameters as and when needed. Soon, you’ll witness your business achieving leads, rankings, and traffic that you had never envisaged.
