NAP

NAP refers to the three essential pieces of contact information that identify a business: its legal name, street address, and phone number. Search engines like Google use NAP consistency across web properties—your website, local directories, review sites, and citations—as a trust signal and ranking factor for local search results. When NAP data is inconsistent, contradictory, or missing across the web, it confuses both algorithms and potential customers, weakening local visibility and credibility.

In practice, SEOs conducting local SEO audits check NAP consistency across dozens of properties: Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps, industry-specific directories, and anywhere else the business appears. Even small discrepancies—a missing suite number, a formatting variation, a typo in the phone number—can fragment the business's authority signal. The work involves standardizing how NAP appears everywhere and, where possible, getting inaccurate listings corrected or removed. For multi-location businesses, maintaining distinct, consistent NAP data for each location is critical to prevent ranking confusion.