NAP Consistency and Local Visibility

What is NAP?

NAP is an acronym for 'Name, Address and Phone Number.' Any reference to a company's name with a physical address and/or phone number on the Internet is what is commonly known as a business citation. Some while back, the major search engines began using these citations as a major factor in their local search ranking. That being said, if all of the other factors between two competing websites are of equal weight then the site with the most credible number of citations would certainly rank higher.

For instance hypothetically, there's a business in Florence, SC that sell widgets known as Company A. Most of their business is local but some of it is globally via their website. There just happens to be, for arguments sake, another local business in the Pee Dee that also sells widgets known as Company B. They both have websites and are both about equal as far as SEO goes except that Company A has many business citation irregularities on many websites. Company B has consistent citations and will ultimately rank much higher in the Florence area and nationally with much less effort that Company A.

It's also very important that the citations be consistent across the board. It can be very detrimental to the performance of a website when multiple citations are inconsistent. For example, over the years a business has moved and changed phone numbers many times and has also submitted different addresses and phone numbers to different sites as part of the SEO submission process. The local chamber of commerce has one set of information, Google My Business shows another and Bing Places has yet another...so on and so forth.

There are many services out there that claim to be able to correct inconsistencies in business citations, for a fee of course. But, there is no substitute for keeping up with all SEO efforts for any site in a well-organized manner. It can get overwhelming trying to remember where and when a submission occurred several years ago. And, it's almost a sure bet that no service is going to be 100% accurate in finding every misstep taken over a long time period.

Business citations from highly indexed sites like Superpages can help search engines ensure that a site is what it claims to be and, thus add to the domain's local authority. However, the same citation in Superpages can be detrimental to a sites overall SEO if it is contradicted in other places.

If you are beginning a new website and trying to do some initial SEO for it then keep two things in mind. First, keep up with what you do. Don't go submitting your site all over the place and get sloppy in the process...it could come back to haunt you later. Stay organized. And, quality trumps quantity any day of the week. Focus on getting your site included with your local chamber of commerce, etc. These types of listings will beat any of the "submit your site to 10,000 directories at once" scams. Pick your battles.