877-490-8324NAP information or “Name, Address, Phone” Citations are about the most basic, primal thing you can display on your website. For local businesses, probably the most important as well. What about offsite on other web locations (directories, search engines, etc)? Many times, this information is randomly gathered by old web crawls, data records, etc. and published and re-purposed throughout the world wide web with little or no system of checks in place. As time goes on, these citations can become more numerous and really become a black-eye on your business’s credibility.
Here’s Google’s angle on this topic:
Google wants to provide its searchers with information that will help them as quickly as possible.
Why?
Well, if Google provides bad address/phone results, you might not trust Google anymore, and you might stop doing as many searches. This might cause you not see Google’s ads and click on them. Google not happy.
To that effect, when you ask Google for a recommendation, it needs to make sure that:
* It’s recommending great, trustworthy people and businesses.
* It’s giving you the right contact information for a business you’ve located (because, as a consumer, when your toilet is overflowing and you need a plumber, you don’t want to hear “this number is not in service”)
* Every place that your NAP info appears on the web – whether it’s on your website or in a directory – is another business card in Google’s purse. If your business cards give conflicting information, that’s a big strike against your chances of being recommended.
It’s that simple.
You CAN clean up your citations on the web. It takes some work, but it’s worth it.
Step 1 – Decide what you want your official NAP INFO to be.
100 S. Main St?
100 South Main St?
100 South Main St, Suite 305?
These small variations do make a difference, so only have one version.
Step 2 – Make sure ONLY your official NAP INFO is on your website.
Be consistent on your contact page, landing pages, website footer, etc.
Step 3 – Post and/or correct your official NAP INFO with all of the major search directories.
This part can be a lot of work and requires a consistent effort to make sure you correct any bad listings as well as remove any duplicate listings. Chances are, your business has several duplicate listings on most of the directories out there. You can always hire a service to do this for you as well. After all, there are only about several hundred local search directories you need to be concerned about.
Our SEO Lite service is one of the most affordable services around and does ALL OF THIS FOR YOU. Click here to learn more.