NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number and it symbolizes the three most important things that you should pay attention to when building citations and local listings for your business. These attributes of your business are the most important information you can spread across the internet to increase your customer base. A fourth attribute, arguably, could be your website. However, the consistency of this characteristic doesn’t play as much into the way search engines rank your business. Also, it doesn’t help out the acronym at all (NAWP? WNAP? NAPW?).
Remember these key factors when working on local listing optimization and creation to give your business the best advantage at ranking locally for the customers that are in need of your services:
1 | Your first and foremost priority should be to make sure your NAP stays consistent throughout all the listings that you both work on and find through internet searches for your business.
2 | Most local listing sites feed to or pull data from other sites, so it’s important to correct these NAP inconsistencies as soon as you find them before the false information gets spread to other sites.
3 | There are specific criteria for NAP for some local listing sites, so before you start building the listings, make sure the info you plan to use on all listing sites is the same. For example, Google doesn’t accept 1-800 numbers or P.O. Boxes as addresses. Before you start building citations on local listings using your 1-800 number or a P.O. Box, make sure you have NAP data that is eligible to be consistent throughout your local listings and is approved by Google (in my opinion, the most important listing).
For more information on our local listing optimization process, or for additional resources for your own process, see the Related Posts at the bottom of this post.
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