What does “NAP” even mean?

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Introduction

If your company has just investing in SEO, then this means you’re probably already familiar with hearing the term “NAP”.

That’s to say your SEO agency may have mentioned in their monthly seo report that they have adding your companies NAP details to business citations.

Yet, what does this all mean?

Well this blog post is dedicated to explaining what NAP means and how it can be used to improve your company’s SEO.

Okay, come on then, what does NAP mean?

Well one things for sure, that is NAP doesn’t need some elaborate answer, that’s because NAP just means your businesses name, its address and the companies phone number- that is it!

However what need a bit more of an explanation is how a businesses NAP details can be used to help improve that businesses SEO.

So, how do you use a businesses NAP details to improve its SEO?

Well first things first you have to get the businesses NAP details on the website. Now that’s done you may wish to ask a digital marketing agency whether that information can be crawled and indexed.

Whether or not the businesses NAP details can be crawled and indexed is just a fancy way of saying can Google read this information?

For example, you may have a website where the NAP details are displayed in a picture, if so this would make it harder for Googlebot to read the information.

So you just want the information written in plain text, but if your seo company wants to push the  boat out, well we would recommend marking-up the text using Schema.

Now that’s done its time to set up a Google My Business account.

Google My Business

Now that the NAP information is on your website, you may wish to set up a Google My Business account.

Now this is an absolute piece of cake, so its well worth you staying an extra hour to build your Google My Business account.

Business citations

The next thing would be to build business citations, these are easy to do, just make sure that you mention your companies NAP details in exactly the same way you mentioned these on your website.

Okay so what’s the whole point of this?

Well, in order to answer that its easier to provide an example, so let’s imagine there are two builders and both want to invest in local seo.

Now builder A goes to an SEO company that hasn’t got a clue. The construction business changes addresses, they notify the seo company and they update the company’s website, but not the Google My Business account or the businesses 30 odd business citations.

What does this mean?

Well it means the business now has “conflicting business citations”- which simply means that the business is mentioned on its website as being in one address, and the business citations state its at the old address.

This confuses people that want to know where the construction firm is based, and it confuses Google’s algorithms as it may not know if the business is at the old address or the new one.

Now let’s look at construction firm B, they have hired a leading seo agency, and that marketing agency has correctly implemented the businesses NAP details.

So, the NAP details have been correctly put on the companies website, they can be read by Googlebot. Also the businesses Google My Business account and all of the businesses citations match with the website.

So which website do you think will rank higher?

Well its likely to be construction firm B.

Construction firm B doesn’t cause any headaches as to where the business is located, and therefore customers and the algorithms therefore have much better confidence that the business is at that business location.

Okay, it sounds like you know what your talking about, how much does this SEO cost?

Well, this does depend on the level of competition that your business faces. The reason it depends on the level of competition is simply because its likely that most of your companies competitors will also want their website on the first page of Google as well.

So this means if the level of competition is high, that the level of SEO work needed is often substantial.

So in order to provide your business with an accurate quote, we would we need to look at your website to work out how much work is needed, and how good your competitors SEO is as well.

If therefore you would like to obtain a quote, then why not give us a ring?