What is NAP
What is NAP?
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. It is a very important part of what is known as Local SEO (search engine optimization). NAP consistency is becoming a factor many marketers are starting to pay heavy attention to.
“Optimizing” NAP essentially involves tracking where your company’s information is and making sure that you control it and that it is accurate.
Why should contractors care about NAP?
Really, everyone should care about NAP. Name, Address, and Phone number are some of the most fundamental communication and discovery tools available to businesses. How is someone supposed to find your cabinet company if they don’t know what name you go by? Similarly, how can someone know what number is actually your business if you have multiple numbers floating around?
How NAP affects Your Search Engine Presence
People are doing more research.
The number of people looking for information and pulling the trigger from a smart phone is decreasing. In fact, it used to be that over 32% of searches ended with a single screen. By single screen, we mean that the consumer made a choice based on a search from one device. Today that number is in the teens.
Why does that matter?
More screens means more searches. More searches means that the consistency of NAP data is vital to a consistent brand image to your customers. The good news is NAP is typically very easy to manage. Most companies just need to pay attention to Google Maps, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, Local Chamber pages, Youtube, and other social medias.
If that sounds like a lot of places to manage data, it can be. However, the beauty of NAP is changes to your name, address, and phone number are extremely rare. When they do happen, there is usually a concerted effort in the company to ensure the new data is communicated. We advise companies to add online NAP updates to their protocols for whenever a NAP characteristic changes.
NAP affects SEO
Not only is NAP important for user experience, but it is important for SEO. Google and other search providers do not like when basic information about a company is conflicting. This lines up a perfect double whammy for SEO. The inability for people to get consistent answers increases negative metrics like bounce rate, lowering SEO. While that happens, Googles bots are also crawling the web finding conflicting information, further diminishing SEO efforts.
Bringing it All together
Don’t Sleep on your NAP.
Now that you know what NAP is and how it applies to contractors, it should be clear this basic information has a big impact. We have discussed the relative ease of maintaining a consistent NAP presence, and discussed it’s effect on people searching for your company. It is especially important as people make searches on a number of platforms.
Keep record of where you list your NAP.
The best solution to this problem is to maintain a shared spreadsheet or list of where NAP is posted by your company. If NAP is listed on a website that you dont have access to, make sure you note it and try to touch base with the webmaster. Building these relationships not only help manage NAP but can be leveraged in the future for link building.
Market your construction company
Have you recently started a construction company? Maybe you are part of an established company. If you are looking to increase your brand visibility, we would love to help you. Our team has decades of experience in numerous marketing disciplines. From web design and writing, media and content creation, SEO and analytics, and construction we have experience with it all.
We are passionate about delivering results to our clients. We love helping them increase sales and empower their teams. Our marketing helps clients generate sales, hire employees, inspire current employees, and shape their brand image.
