In the old days… like about 100 years ago, when the postcard above was mailed to a recipient in Sonoma County; a geographic region and town apparently sufficed. The postcard founds it’s was to the intended recipient in, what was then, a tiny little community. Times have changed. Now, it is imperative to have a well-defined NAP in order to be located in the grand scheme of things.
“What is a NAP?” you may ask. NAP in the SEO world is an acronym for Name, Address & Phone. It is your business address on the web and it is extremely important to have it accessible on your website. Note that I mentioned, ‘accessible,’ meaning that it should be easily interpreted by the search bots that crawl your it in attempt to make sense of information contained therein.
Take a look at the Local Search Ecosystem as presented by David Mihm, renowned Local Search Engine Marketing expert. With this comprehensive graph, David illustrates how portals and major data providers share citations across the web. Citations are simply mentions of your business name on these portal and listing sites.
One can quickly surmise how convoluted matters might become when multiple variations of your business NAP are shared in this Local Search Ecosystem.
[blockquote]Google spiders all of these secondary portals regularly, so it’s important to make sure your information is correct and consistent EVERYWHERE across the web.
One can quickly surmise how convoluted matters might become when multiple variations of your business NAP are shared in this Local Search Ecosystem.
[blockquote]Google spiders all of these secondary portals regularly, so it’s important to make sure your information is correct and consistent EVERYWHERE across the web.David Mihm
[/blockquote] Local SEOs should strive to locate, verify and correct as many instances of their clients’ citations as possible. It is an arduous task at best, however the efforts will generally become evident in your client’s Google+ Local rankings and, will ultimately contribute to a happy & healthy Local Search Ecosystem.