When it comes to digital marketing, there are so many acronyms out there that things can get confusing. The acronym that seems to cause the most confusion is NAP.
Many small business owners hear about how important NAP consistency is and that they should focus on cleaning up NAP citations, but they’re sitting there wondering..
“What does NAP stand for in SEO?”
At AWC, our goal is to make businesses’ SEO as successful, trackable, and understandable as possible—which is why we’re going to explain what NAP is, and why NAP or NAPW consistency is important for your company’s local SEO, and how to get it right.
Simply put, NAP stands for:
- Name
- Address
- Phone Number
These three nuggets of information are important details in their own right but add them together and that can be the reason why a customer walks into your store – or the cause of them getting lost, being frustrated, wasting their time or, visiting a competitor.
As we’ve seen, NAP is an important ranking factor, but you may well find that you have lots of NAP listings that you haven’t actually set out to build. That’s because NAP listings occur naturally, simply as a result of you going about your regular marketing activity.
If you open a Facebook business page and fill in the profile details requested, for example, you’ve created a NAP citation.
If you create an event and publish details of that event online, perhaps so customers can buy tickets or for local residents to attend at your place of business, you’ve inadvertently added another NAP citation to your collection.
Likewise, if you exhibit at a conference and that conference publishes exhibitor information online, or if you’re referenced in a local blog, newspaper or magazine article, or if you add your site to an industry directory in order to direct niche traffic to your business, you’ve racked up yet more NAP mentions without even trying.
There are several reasons why it’s important to keep your NAPW consistent:
- You don’t want customers calling an old phone number
- You don’t want customers showing up to an old address
- You don’t want customers visiting a website that doesn’t exist anymore
- It’s a determining factor in deciding if your business is eligible to show up in the local pack
Having consistent NAPW has been shown to help with SEO. On a small scale, this is hard to measure.
However, when a large study was done it was discovered that…
“Enforcing citation consistency and removing duplicates produced a net 23% increase in pack presence.”
Keep in mind NAPW consistency doesn’t help you to outrank competitors, it only helps you to be eligible to show up in the local pack.
Conclusion
NAP data plays an important role in both search engine visibility and consumer trust. It can give you a leg up in the rankings making it easy for people to find you or frustrate them and eat into the brand trust.
Taking time to ensure you have NAP consistency is an easy way to feel confident that you’re doing all you can to optimize your search presence and drive consumers to your doors.
We Can Take Care of Your Company’s Local SEO & NAP Consistency!
Maybe you’re too busy to take on this NAP or NAPW consistency issue right now, but you still want to make sure it’s taken care of so your business shows up in local search results.
If that’s the case, no problem—our team of skilled digital marketing specialists can handle it for you.
Contact us with your information, and we’ll clean up your local SEO in no time!
