NAP Consistency

The practice of keeping your business's Name, Address, and Phone number identical across every site that lists it — your own website, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, industry directories, and the dozens of aggregators that feed local data to search engines. NAP is the backbone of local SEO because Google uses it to confirm your business exists where you say it does: when the same NAP appears consistently across the web, Google's confidence in your location rises and so does your local ranking. When it varies — a different phone number on Yelp than on your site, an old address still on a directory, a 'Co.' vs 'Company' in the name — Google treats each variant as a signal of uncertainty, splits or discards citations, and your local pack ranking drops. The damage is invisible until you look for it: most stores inherit NAP inconsistencies from a rebrand, a move, or years of different people adding the business to different directories. The fix is an audit (find every public listing, diff each field against the canonical NAP) and a cleanup pass (correct the directories that allow edits, suppress duplicates, and update the aggregators that feed the long tail of smaller directories).