Your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) profile is very important if you want your business. But, believe it or not, only a small percentage of businesses pay attention to it. So, if you want to get a headstart concerning this particular field, we highly recommend you adjust your NAP profile for local SEO. That said, we will give you some insights on how you can accomplish this.
Before we begin, we must clarify that NAP is crucial to local SEO and that this is reason enough to always improve and adjust your NAP profile. This is especially true when you consider Google’s new algorithm update. Once it launched, it made a consistent NAP an important part of Google’s Local Pack results. What this basically means is that Google recognizes NAP consistency as a sign of legitimacy. Consequently, your website is ranked higher. So, let’s see how you can maximize your online presence in the context of NAP.
To adjust your NAP profile for local SEO…
…Perform a double-check of your business information. So, before you officially register your business and send it out to authoritative institutions, you will need to do some paperwork. Once you start with that, make sure to double-check every NAP component that was originally recorded. What this will do is, it will create the opportunity for updating any new information that may be changed. Whether it is your address or phone number, or even the name of your business, you should always make sure to double-check the original record and then update it, if needed. Once you made sure that your NAP is up-to-date, you won’t have to worry whether you can rank with an inconsistent NAP, since it will, in fact, be consistent.
An additional thing you should do is to conduct a quality audit. Even though it may sound scary and confusing, it really isn’t. You will just have to make a quick search to see how the information about your business is displayed on multiple websites. The point of this quality audit is to check and see if your business is already listed online.
The next step is – update, update, and more update
When it comes to your local SEO rank, you need to take into consideration three elements:
- Website
- Google My Business profile
- Listings and business directories
These three are somewhat of a holy trinity that needs to be updated regularly. If you don’t do that, you won’t be able to rank high in the local search. You can learn more about PageRank online, but we will focus on the aforementioned elements. So, let’s start.
Updating your website is key if you want to adjust your NAP profile for local SEO
When you think about it, your website is the face of your company that will help both customers and the search engines to get your details right. So, all of your data that is presented should align, right? Positive! But, the importance of the data alignment also lies in ensuring that the NAP on your website is accurate and consistent. This goes, not only for the niche in which your business is but also for proper spelling and formatting.
That said, you also need to think about a good place for your NAP data. The safest strategy here is to put it in areas like your header and footer. That way, people, as well as search engines, will be able to recognize it easier. Moreover, it will ensure that your NAP will appear on every page of your website (however many there are). Lastly, put your NAP information on your contact page. This is mandatory since people who would like to contact you will usually go directly to that page. However, you must ensure that the formatting of your NAP data doesn’t render it impossible to read. Even though one might copy and paste it in the search bar, it is always better if the search engine can read and index this data, rather than having it only as an image.
Don’t forget your Google My Business profile!
If you are looking for a single component that is critical to any local SEO strategy, it would be Google My Business. With that in mind, the best way you can make search engines trust your NAP info is to update your Google My Business profile. That way, you will provide a piece of accurate and consistent information directly to Google. Consequently, it will recognize your business as legitimate and improve your PageRank. So, to do this, you need to make sure that all of the NAP data are the same on your website and your Google My Business profile.
Quick side note: You can see a progress bar on the GMB dashboard once your page reaches full optimization. To acquire the full 100% optimization, try and add as many things as possible to the GMB listing. This one of the things that will lead to the complete optimization of your GMB listing. Consequently, it will lead to the growth of your business.
Listings and business directories are the last critical component
To improve your local SEO, it is definitely important to list your business on different directories. That way you will drive more traffic and leads to your website. The best way to accomplish this is by finding a list of trusted listings and directories. Afterward, you will just have to submit your accurate NAP information to these listings and you will increase your business’s performance and boost search visibility.
Lastly – Consistency is crucial if you want to adjust your NAP profile for local SEO
We mentioned NAP consistency throughout the whole article, so it’s only natural to add some extra information about this. To be honest, it can be tricky to ensure clear location signals across your entire business if it is in multiple locations. If that’s the case and you are running different locations, you should include all of them in your NAP data. Moreover, this data should be included on all pages.
If you are having trouble with this, you should head over to AZ Citation Services to see how you can improve all your ratings. This is especially important since many organizations tend to neglect the provided business information. Consequently, they fall short of reaching potential new clients and maximize their outreach. So, to sum up everything, try to avoid duplicating local listings, listing information for closed or moved locations, using different phone numbers for a single location, and including NAP variations. If you avoid these mistakes, you are good to go and your business will thrive!
