Your SEO needs a NAP. Why?
SEO is a great investment in your business. In fact, if you’re a local company, local SEO is one of the most effective SEO strategies you can implement for your business.
Regarding your NAP and local SEO, your NAP is an acronym for your business Name, Address and Phone. You not only need a NAP. You also need a consistent NAP across the internet.
Your NAP impacts how your company fares on SEO across the internet–and particularly for local seo. Having a consistent NAP and company URL on multiple sites across the internet can help robots know that you’re a legitimate business in a specific region.
Your NAP can help your local business advance in the search engine return pages (SERPs)–particularly in your local area. This is called “local SEO.”
It may sound simple. But it’s not. We run reports that show many clients do not fare well in local SEO. And we can help.
First, your company’s name needs to appear consistently for SEO.
Do you call your business Acme, Acme, Inc. or LLC? Do you use a comma between the two? A period between the initials? If so, this needs to be consistent on all sites, such as Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, Twitter, Yelp, Angie’s List and other places where your business appears.
Along with your address and phone, your name needs to be on every single page of your website, too.
In most cases, you’ll want to use your spelling of your company the way it appears on the document you submitted when incorporating your business (if you’re incorporated). If not, just be consistent across all those sites.
Again, make your address consistent across all social media channels, listings, publishers, and aggregators. Apple Maps, Google, Bing Places, and MapQuest are just a few places where you’ll also want to have your correct address.
A best practice is to abbreviate the cardinal directions (N,S, E, W). In addition, abbreviate Hwy, Blvd, St, Rd etc. I prefer to skip the periods as the postal service does (Example 4 above), but your company may choose to use them.
This may seem relatively straightforward, but do you choose to use your 800 number or your local number? Do you have multiple numbers? Based on the research that I’ve done, opinions vary. But, for local businesses, I generally recommend using one consistent local number across all listings, publishers,and aggregators.
Here are a few opportunities I’ve seen in working with companies who are enhancing their SEO.
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