Consistent NAP (or name, address and phone number) entries are vital for SEO of local businesses. Inconsistent NAP’s in local directories across the web can cause lower rankings for local searches.
On July 24, 2014 Google rolled out their Pigeon Update (not to be confused with the April Fool’s joke of PigeonRank technology) which had many local websites drop like a rock in the rankings.
At the heart of a lot of these ranking drops were inconsistent NAP’s. In order for rankings to stay high a website needs to have the exact same information in relation to places like Google Plus Business, Yelp, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Merchant Circle, Linkedin, CitySearch, Mapquest and many more.
Some of these inconsistent listings are unavoidable such as if a business has a change in name or a change in address.
The solution is to first make sure that your website and Google Plus are perfectly aligned with exact match name, address and phone number. Second, make sure that the top local directories such as those mentioned above are also perfectly aligned. Close enough doesn’t count here.
So, if you don’t want your company to have an unhappy mishap that falls into your lap regarding your Google Map then make sure you have a reliable NAP so that you can sleep at night. That’s a rap.
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