Name, Address, Phone Number: N.A.P. for Local Business

What is a N.A.P.?

As a local business, one of the most important factors that you must care about when setting up your site is your name, address and phone number (N.A.P.). You must care about where you put it on and off your site. This will make it easily accessible by the crawlers and in return searchers will find your business.

Why Do You Need N.A.P. For Your Local Business?

If you are a local or regional business, it can sometimes be disheartening fighting against larger companies, like Amazon or Ebay. However, you’ve got the power where they don’t: your physical location. You can rock that local listing!

How to Use N.A.P. For Local SEO?

You should use the N.A.P. both on your site and off your site in citation.

On-Site N.A.P.:

• For a store with one location: Keep the N.A.P. in the footer and on the contact us page
• Multiple locations: Put the N.A.P.’s on the contact us page

Mission Coffee Co kept it In the footer:

Caffe Luxxe kept it on the contact us page:

Off-Site N.A.P.:

• Gather citations that are unique to your geographical location.

N.A.P. Needs Consistency and Accuracy

Everything that is written about your business on other sites have to be correct and written exactly the same as it is on your site.

Does your Yelp page information match your Foursquare information? What about your Google + or Facebook page?

Everything must line up and look identical. For your phone numbers, decide if you’d like to include the country code, and have dots or dashes separate the numbers. As for the address, do you want to write Ave. or Avenue, St. or Street?

Keep All Those Listings Squared up and Up-To-Date.

Double check that those citations and backlinks match the name, address, and phone number of your current business. If you have recently moved, changed names or anything else that could have caused changes, update those listings!

Check out these two examples which I found for Mission Coffee Co. LLC in Columbus, Oh – compare with the footer above, can you see how they can improve it?

This one is consistent with the address, but it is missing the phone number. The owner of this shop ought to reach out and try to get a more accurate listing.

On this citation, the phone number is listed and the address matches – everything is accurate now, but not completely consistent. This citation is using dashes instead of dots for the phone number.

One thing that is absolutely wonderful about both of these examples is that they are both from highly local resources. Both sites are about things to do within Columbus, where the cafe is found. You need to get these hyper-centric citations.

N.A.P & SEO: The Perfect Strategy

A consistent N.A.P. is important for your local SEO strategy. You are more likely to get ranked in the organic searches and be found by a more targeted potential customer.