Ranking On Google Maps
After your Google My Business page is set up and optimized, you’ll want to get NAP citations. This is going to be a gigantic factor in your business ranking for a search on maps.
What does NAP mean?
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. More recently a few terms have been thrown around like NAPU (Name, Address, Phone Number URL) or NAPW (Name, Address, Phone Number, Website).
You’ll want to get NAP citations on relevant directories around the web for a few reasons:
- According to the latest studies by Moz, Citation signals account for 13% of the ranking factors!
- Many people ALSO use these directories to search for businesses (not just on Google!)
- Many of these directories rank for localized terms
- You can also get a relevant link to your site by creating a listing!
As you can see, having correct NAP citation is important for lots of reasons!
Citation Consistency
Citation inconsistency can cause ranking problems.
Sometimes business can run into a pickle if somethings has changed like your address or phone number. It’s time to do an audit to make sure all your citations are consistent.
Why is that paramount?
A citation is any online reference to your NAP. It does not need to link to you, but Google evaluates them as a local signal to determine an entity’s online authority.
Having inaccurate and inconsistent NAP can negatively affect your local SEO.
According to Search Engine Land columnist Myles Anderson, citation inconsistency is actually the no. 1 issue affecting local SEO ranking.
If you have too many variations of your NAP scattered around the web, especially if some or many of those are outdated, this makes it hard for customers and thus, Google, to trust your information. If Google thinks your data is untrustworthy, this could downgrade your local search ranking.
So, how do you check for citation consistency?
How To Audit And Optimize Your Local Citations
The most complete way to do a citation audit is to do it manually and uncover all listings and variations of your NAP.
But if you just want to do a fast check, you can use Moz Local.
Enter the business name in the input bar you see on the left, and your zip code to the right, then select Check my Business Listing.
Moz local compiles up all corresponding listings related to your website from the popular local indexing platforms (high authority resource listings that will have the highest results) and displays any irregularities it finds.
Once you see these irregularities, record them in an excel sheet and make a note to contact the domain owners to correct the NAP info with the one that’s the same with what you have.
The results from Moz local are restricted to the top indexing platforms that Moz has tagged, so it is possible that you may still have citations from other less popular or structured sources.
These other citations may have lower impact, and it will take you time to do a formal audit for every last one, but if you’re so inclined, we created a citation audit and cleanup services that can do a more comprehensive, in-depth job for you. Contact us at the link above to hear more about this.
After you have combed through your citations, you can move on to growing citations.
How To Make Local NAP Citations
All businesses are different in some way, and you’ll want to create creative citations based on your business and area. Two good places to start with creating directory citations are these lists:
With those lists, you can find the very top directories that you should be listed in based on your industry and situation.
When building these listings, you’ll want to make sure to fully fill out the profile, including your business description, hours, photos, NAP, and more.
Citations can be a bit of a struggle to create yourself though, which is why we made a service that will do this for you.
Next, we’ll move on to optimizing your website to appear for high value search terms!