NAP stands for the name, address and phone fields in your citations (aka local business listings). When managing your citations, you want to make sure that your business name, address and phone number are correct on all of your citations. It’s also important to include the correct address to your website.
There are several reasons why it’s important to keep your NAPW consistent:
- You don’t want customers calling an old phone number
- You don’t want customers showing up to an old address
- You don’t want customers visiting a website that doesn’t exist anymore
- It’s a determining factor in deciding if your business is eligible to show up in the local pack
Having consistent NAPW has been shown to help with SEO. On a small scale, this is hard to measure. However, when a large study was done it was discovered that “Enforcing citation consistency and removing duplicates produced a net 23% increase in pack presence.”
Keep in mind NAPW consistency doesn’t help you to outrank competitors, it only helps you to be eligible to show up in the local pack.
