What does NAP mean?

Introduction

When visiting your SEO company, your bound to hear many SEO terms that may not sound familiar to you.

Some business owners will immediately ask their seo agency what a particular term means, yet some other business owners will want an in depth understanding of what the term means, and to make an assessment whether this form of SEO will help their business.

So, if you are investing in local SEO, well you are bound to have heard of the term “NAP” before now.

We thought therefore it was time to ask one of our seo consultants to write a rather informative article about what NAP means, and why this is important when working on a businesses local seo.

What does NAP mean?

NAP quite simply means the name of your business, its address and also its phone number.

It really is as simple as that.

Why is NAP important?

NAP is therefore an abbreviation to describe important business details, and us SEO agencies use this information to help improve your company’s SEO.

In order for you to understand why NAP is so important, it’s a good idea to provide you with an example.

Let us set the scene, you’ve got a demanding client, your working in your office and you think I want a tasty pizza delivered.

So you have a look on Google for local pizza takeaway shops. Now for simplicity we are going to refer to pizza shop one as A and pizza shop two as business B.

Business A has a website, it states its address, yet the business has recently moved addresses, so now it has its new address on its website, and a Google My Business account which mentions the old address.

This is what we SEO’s call a conflicting citation. This conflicting citation causes confusion, as where is the pizza shop?

Is the pizza shop where the company website says it is, or is the pizza shop where the Google My Business account says it is, because the business hasn’t changed the address to the new address?

Now business B employs a digital marketing agency, as part of their monthly SEO tasks they have agreed to check the businesses citations, and aim to rectify any conflicting business citations.

Now as a result of employing this SEO company business B doesn’t have any conflicting business citations. In matter of fact it has NAP details added to the website, which have been marked-up using Schema.

The digital marketing agency has then created a Google My Business account which has NAP information which matches the website. The seo company has then implemented business citations which also match the NAP information on businesses B’s website.

Now which business do think has better SEO?

Business B has better SEO.

Who should manage my businesses NAP information?

A business should manage its NAP information, yet a lot of businesses also ask their seo company to do this for them.

Also its worth mentioning that this shouldn’t just be a task that’s done just once, no the reason is that often many business directories can sometimes create NAP information for the business, and sometimes they get the NAP detail incorrect.

For example, sometimes the NAP information has an incorrect postcode, or the telephone number is wrong because the website mentions an internal telephone number, and not the main phone number.

So your seo agency should check your businesses NAP information on a regular basis, that’s on your company website, business citations and on Google My Business.

What does local SEO mean?

Local SEO is the process of improving a businesses website so that appears higher for a range of keywords.

So for example, a shop that sells fishing equipment will want to appear higher on Google for “fishing rods” or “angling supplies”.

The business that sells fishing equipment may therefore work with an SEO agency to improve the businesses seo.

This is so that when someone is looking for a local business, and when someone is looking for fishing equipment the business appears.

Now the term local SEO is often used to describe two different types of SEO, that’s organic seo and also to improve where the business ranks within the Google My Business results.

How much local SEO cost?

This is dependent on the level of competition that your businesses faces, for example it would be much easier normally to put a fishing equipment retailer on the first page of Google locally, than ist would say a divorce solicitor.

Why is that so?

The reason is that the divorce solicitors are likely to have heavily invested in SEO, which means the standard of SEO already implemented is likely to be high.

Therefore in order to beat a competitor the amount of SEO work is often high. Yet with the business that sells fishing equipment locally, there may well be only a small number of fishing equipment retailers in that area.

And only some of these businesses may well be investing in seo, so it would be relatively easy to get such a business onto the first page of Google.

Can your digital marketing agency help?

Yes, if your business needs organic seo, or local seo we offer very affordable prices, so why not give our seo agency a call?