NAP is a common term in Local SEO. You might be asking what is this and why should you care about it.
NAP stands for
Name
Address
Phone Number
These are three critical parts of all online profiles for your business and your local SEO strategy.
This information helps search engines identify and verify
Business’s location
Business’s contact information
When you have inconsistent values across platforms, search engines do not know which values to trust nor use. This can damage your local ranking in tools, like Google Business.
NAP seems easy enough.
But, addresses or locations change, phone number area codes update or even a slight difference in the spelling of a street name, can impact the quality of NAP for Local SEO purposes.
This can be an enormous undertaking to update several online business directories. There are 3rd party agencies that can update your information in key places and allow it to trickle down to all platforms.
The one thing to be careful of when using a 3rd party company to manage your online NAP, you may not own the listing. Once you stop paying a subscription fee to the company, you could lose all updates.
This is why I suggest finding a way to correct and own the updates yourself and not be reliant on a subscription.
To start off, with out incurring additional costs to managing this.
When I work with a new client these are the areas I check immediately.
- Google Business
- Bing Business
- Apple Maps
- Your Website
- All Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
- In city directories (chamber of commerce for example)
These are platforms that you have direct access and control. You can easily make the updates yourself without involving a 3rd party agency.
A longer game plan is to manage all other directories and listings across the web. This does take more effort and as I mentioned, there are a few SEO agencies that work in this area all the time. This requires project management and follow up to track the progress.
If you are a business or solo professional, operating in your local market, Local SEO and search rankings are important for you.
The audit and updates of NAP on the main platforms I mentioned are items you can ask a virtual assistant to review and update for you.
