A smart businessman thinks big, starts small and learns fast. Before you are big enough to increase your sales and establish as a brand in a large competitive landscape, targeting local audiences is a smart move. Start your journey to growing big online with a local SEO agency. Local SEO has the potential to drive more business to your website. When 97% of the search engine users look for a local business and 88% of those users contact the business, you cannot ignore local SEO. Your local SEO strategy should also include voice search optimization as 58% of adults in the US find local businesses using voice search.
Local SEO is important for the following reasons:
- It attracts more customers at a little cost.
- It improves online visibility among local audiences.
- Your business can reach more people on other platforms such as Apple Maps, Waze, TripAdvisor, and Yellowpages.
- A local SEO agency can generate more leads and sales.
- Your business gets a competitive advantage.
- It increases authority and trustworthiness.
- You can grow a local following.
However, there are some local SEO mistakes that can be deadly for your campaign. In this article, you will learn how you can lose potential customers by ignoring NAP or implementing NAP listings incorrectly. There are some other local SEO mistakes such as ignoring Google My Business, not optimizing for mobile, duplicate listings, not filling relevant business categories, missing or unoptimized contact information, not having customer reviews, not having citations, poorly optimized local content or no local content at all and being inactive on social media. Let’s focus on NAP listings only.
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NAP in Local SEO
NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number. NAP listing is a key part of your affordable local search engine optimization. A local SEO agency mentions your business name, address and phone number on different platforms to increase the online presence of your local business. However, all NAP listings have to be correct and consistent. For example, if you are using multiple phone numbers for business, make sure that all NAP listings have all the four phone numbers, same name and same address. Each listing should be well-optimized. Accurate information is highly important for search engines and target audience.
Importance of NAP in Local SEO
When you approach an agency for local business SEO for WordPress, the best agency offers a free website audit. If the local SEO audit does not include NAP for local SEO, don’t trust that agency. NAP listings are crucial for local SEO. When the search engine crawls to find information about your business on your website and other websites, the search engine scans all listings for NAP accuracy and consistency. Google stores and uses this information to rank your website. Incorrect and inconsistent information means poor user experience. Google does not appreciate poor user experience.
The search engine does not want to show incorrect information. Therefore, Google does not rank a website with inaccurate or inconsistent NAP information or any other kind of incorrect information.
NAP listings is one of the factors that impact local SEO performance. The contribution of NAP listings in local SEO performance is around 16%.
- Many websites have only a Contact form on the Contact Us This is not good for your local SEO. A local SEO agency ensures that this critical information is available on your website so that both Google and your customers can read your name, address and phone number. This information must be in text format as the search engine cannot read images.
- The local SEO agency claims Google My Business listings. The agency updates these listings with the correct name, address, phone number.
- You can use Google site operators to identify incorrect listings. Search your business name, phone number and address on specific directories.
- Maintain a record of all the correct and incorrect listings.
- Match name, address and phone number on all listings. Correct the incorrect information.
NAP listings have a significant impact on your website authority and ranking. Your potential customers can easily access this important information to contact you. Google checks the consistency of this information and uses it as a ranking factor. You can drive more sales with accurate information. On the other hand, not having NAP listings or inconsistent listings will hurt your online presence.
