What Is NAP And How Does It Help Local SEO?

Finding a specific local business without the right name, address, or phone number can be frustrating, especially when multiple listings for the same business are available. Aside from the frustration it causes your potential customers, not having enough local visibility can significantly impact your business’s ability to attract footfalls and eventually not generate consistent revenue.

With the rise of the internet and more people using their phones to search for things, it has become critical for local businesses to make their online presence more known, discoverable, and accessible to approach. One way to do this is by registering your business online and guaranteeing that your business rides the wave and gets seen; using NAP to your advantage is the best move.

If you are wondering what’s NAP and why get started with it, here’s everything you need to know:

What is NAP?

NAP stands for name, address, and phone number and is a crucial part of local SEO. It needs to be correct and consistent throughout the website and on any business listings on search platforms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! An accurate and updated NAP makes it significantly easier for your target audience to find your business and approach you for their needs.

An incorrect NAP makes it challenging for potential customers to find your business and makes your business less credible and trustworthy. It also makes it difficult for search engines to show your business as part of the search results. For this reason, whether you are setting up a new listing profile or optimizing information on your website, ensuring consistency in information is the key.

Is NAP a Ranking Factor?

Yes, NAP is a SERP ranking factor from local search engine optimization and local 3-pack perspective. It carries enough weightage to have a slight influence on the efforts you have been making. Due to this, it is crucial that you pay close attention to the business details present on your website and listing on online directories.

Why is NAP Consistency Important in Local SEO?

Correct and updated NAP ensures that information about your business name, address, and phone number is consistent across all the platforms where you have listed your business. As a local business, it is crucial that your business is easy to find and contact. Inconsistent or inaccurate information will make it difficult for your customers to connect with you and seek your services or products.

It also hampers the user experience your business provides to its customers, eventually leading to a dip in your ranking potential. Aside from this, providing correct information about your business guarantees more leads and higher chances of conversions. Optimized NAP helps search engines understand your business’s identity and location, giving your business the visibility it needs.

Additionally, if your business has multiple locations, NAP becomes even more crucial to direct traffic to the venue closest to a user’s location. Search engines will not be able to provide correct contact information if your listing is not correctly updated. NAP allows you to put yourself in front of your target audience, helping them connect with you easily.

10 NAP Consistency SEO Tips to Boost Your Local Rankings

With NAP being a vital component of making your online presence stand out, it is crucial to get it right. Here are some effective ways you can use NAP to your advantage:

1. Keep Everything Consistent

With NAP being a crucial ranking factor, it is always recommended to maintain consistency throughout the website and online listing. Every search engine has its own methodology for scanning and understanding the importance of information shared, so being consistent across different online platforms ensures they can draw a relation between information shared.

Consistency in information ensures that search engines see uniformity and perceive it as the universal truth about your business. This way, whenever a search is made about your company or the range of products or services you deal in, your business name will pop up among the options.

2. Conduct An Audit Before You Start

Conducting an audit before making your store live is crucial to ensure the information’s accuracy and correctness. Using a site audit tool is the best way to achieve this.

Here are the key things to keep in mind when auditing your listing:

• Check if your business’s legal name, address, and phone number are accurately mentioned on your website and the online listing. Look specifically for typos and misspellings, as they can drastically change the meaning of your listing.
• When adding business hours, make sure that you are listing in your time zone and are using a 12-hour format instead of 24-hour to prevent any confusion. You should also consider adding ‘A.M’ or ‘P.M’ to be more clear.
• Mention the off days. If your business is available for service 24/7, ensure this is reflected on the listing correctly.
• If you are using abbreviations, use the universally recognized short forms instead of creating your own. This will ensure that your customers understand exactly what you are trying to say.

3. Focus on High-Impact Directories

It is highly recommended that you focus on getting your website listed on websites with higher domain authority and reputation instead of getting your business listed on low-quality directories.

Here’s why this is important:

1. It significantly increases your website’s online visibility and gives you a higher chance of genuinely interested leads turning into sales.
2. Listing on such websites adds credibility to the business, as reputed websites do not list businesses without an adequate verification process. Getting listed directly translates to your business being genuine and trustworthy.
3. As these websites already have a favorable reputation in the eyes of search engines, getting your website listed will also make you seem credible, increasing the odds of your website ranking higher on search engines.

4. Implement Local Schema Markup

Adding a LocalBusiness structure code makes your website eligible for rich results that help a brand stand out from the crowd. Doing so will help generate higher click-through rates, more conversions, and more organic traffic.

The schema markup helps search engines understand your website’s type of business and its range of services. The standardized structure also makes it easier for humans and algorithms to understand information structure.

5. Eliminate Duplicate Listings

Duplicate listings frustrate customers and confuse search engines. They also significantly impact a business’s position in search results and Google Maps. Automation, human error, and data changes are some ways these listings occur.

Here’s why duplicate listings are harmful:

• They make your business seem inconsistent to search engines, lowering your website’s ranking.
• It creates scope for getting reported by competitors and customers, resulting in penalties or bans.
• Your potential customers do not know which listing to trust, eventually preventing them from contacting you.

6. Strategic Local Link Building

Link building is a potent way to create local content pieces, build local partnerships, claim unlinked mentions, and collaborate with other local businesses. Local links familiarize your brand name and ignite potential customers’ eagerness to learn more about your offerings, eventually increasing traffic and footfalls.

Here are the key benefits of local link building:

• Improves the local traffic influx on the website and brick-and-mortar store.
• It encourages higher local search engine rankings, increasing sales, click-through rates, and conversions.
• Higher visibility, improved user experience, and lower bounce rates.
• Doing so also improves your brand website’s trustworthiness, credibility, and reliability.

7. Add NAP on Every Page

Including NAP on every page of your website makes it easier for your customers to find your local store’s location or contact information directly from the page they are on. This eliminates the need to visit the contact page and results in your customers acting on their decision without losing motivation.

8. Responsive Design Considerations

With the rise in the number of people using their mobile phones to search for what they need, optimizing business websites to be highly responsive on mobile devices has become crucial. It guarantees an impeccable browsing experience and makes it easier for your customers to check out with their purchase from the website without any hassles. Using mobiles, customers can access your services from anywhere.

9. Avoid NAP in Images

Display NAP in plain text and not in images, as search engines cannot read and understand images. Ensure that the NAP is accurate on all web pages to prevent inconsistencies.

Instead, do the following:

• Make use of HTML image elements to embed images, adding more value and information to the images.
• Consider submitting an image sitemap CDN (content delivery network) to host images instead.
• Use the supported format to keep the images responsive so that your potential customers have a pleasant browsing experience regardless of the device they use.

10. Regular Site Audits with NAP in Focus

Regular site inspections are among the best steps a website owner can take to prevent inconsistencies or duplicacies in NAPs. The most effective way to do this is to use site audit tools, which can scan the website (even the large ones) and highlight the ones requiring attention.

Bottomline

Keeping your business’s NAP updated and consistent everywhere is the key to making your potential customers find and contact you easily. To make sure your listing is meaningful, include vital information, including the legal business name, the address, and the phone number that always has someone answering it. Taking advantage of local directories and websites is another incredible way to create a familiar local online presence, engineering your way into your potential customers’ lives without bothering them with nonstop ads.