If you want to drive traffic to your business, you need to give your customers good directions. This is what NAP (name, address, and phone number) information is all about.
Your customers need accurate contact information about your business in order to find you, and the NAP info provided in listing directories is where search engines get that information.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing pull information about your business from directories. Your business’s NAP information needs to be correct in these directories before the search engines can get it right.
Don’t think that you can relax just because the info is correct on your website. If the information about your business is wrong in the directories, it’ll be wrong on search engines.
Your website is just one of the sources search engines use to collect data. If it’s your one website vs. 50 incorrect citations (mentions), the incorrect citations win.
Think it doesn’t matter to your business? Take a look at these statistics and then decide:
That’s a lot of business that you’re passing up if your information is wrong in listing directories.
Listing info affects local and organic SEO rankings too, and incorrect information can lower your ranking dramatically. When a search engine sees the same business NAP info across multiple directories, it counts each listing as a citation (or mention).
These citations add to your SEO juice. If your NAP info isn’t the same in each directory then any juice is lost, since search engines think each different listing is a separate business.
Making sure your business’s NAP info is correct should be your number one priority!
If a customer searches for your business and finds the wrong phone number, they’ll be calling the competition before your phone’s done not ringing, and if your address is wrong you’re almost literally driving your customers away.
With so much traffic driven by local mobile searches, your business can’t afford to have inaccurate NAP citation information steering your customers wrong.