We’ve argued this before, but we’re afraid that the significance of our point may have gotten lost in various seas of bullet points of important factors for Local SEO. So, we thought it was worth emphasizing:
Your NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) should be consistent everywhere on the web that it’s listed.
This may sound trivial, but it’s not. Here’s the deal: Google and other search engines are increasingly looking at consistency of your business’s Name, Address and Phone Number to identify your business. Each place on the web that it’s listed -- on your website, on your social media pages, and on business directories -- is called a “citation.” The more citations, the better; but it’s essential that in each place it’s listed it’s consistent. This lets Google and other search engines know that it’s really your business that’s being mentioned. If one listing isn’t consistent, it won’t be considered a citation and won’t give you any Google juice.
Your NAP is your fingerprint.
Much like no two people have the same fingerprint, no two businesses (hopefully) have the same NAP. Two businesses may share a name, of course; two businesses can share an address; and two businesses can even share a phone number. But the combination of the three ensures that the business being mentioned is, indeed, the business that Google thinks it is.
Number of Citations is Important, but Consistency is More Important.
The greater the number of times that your Name, Address and Phone number is listed across the web, the better your chances of showing up high in search results for keywords related to your business; but any NAP that isn’t consistent with the one on your website won’t be counted as a citation, so consistency is crucial.
Make your NAP prevalent on your website as well as business directories.
Make sure that your NAP is consistent across each directory that it’s listed on, but also make sure that you list it on every page of your website. We recommend including it either in the header, footer, or sidebar of your site to ensure that it shows up on each page, and that it’s consistent everywhere.