How Accurate NAP Data is Essential for Electricians’ SEO
Imagine this scenario: on a Tuesday night, a homeowner’s kitchen lights begin to flicker. Not a good flicker, the kind that makes them think the electricity is about to go out. They whip out their phone, search for a nearby electrician, and click on the one that looks right. They get a recorded message for an entirely different company at the phone number provided. The location is not in the same neighbourhood. They click off, and search for another result. That electrician – who may well be the best in the business – just missed a job opportunity not because of the quality of their work, but because of poor online business listings. This is the type of hidden damage that can be caused by inconsistent listings, and it’s one of the most often overlooked aspects of seo for electricians that can shift local rankings.
This all seems so basic. The name, address and phone number (or NAP, as it’s known in local SEO circles), of your business should be consistent across all online listings. Same spelling. Same use of abbreviations, if any. Same phone number format. Same suite number if they are used. Google uses this data across a number of sources to decide how certain it can feel about how to present your business in the local search results. Conflicting data doesn’t just confuse your customers. And it makes algorithms uncertain, and uncertain businesses aren’t displayed with as much confidence as sure ones.
How Discrepancies Occur
The vast majority of listing discrepancies aren’t due to negligence. They’re a natural part of a company’s life cycle. The owner gets a new phone number when they change service providers. The business relocates to a new, bigger location. An older entry on an aggregator site is fed from a source that hasn’t been updated. Or sometimes the business name is slightly different – maybe the legal name is “Foo LLC” but the trading name is “Foo”, and different aggregators picked up different versions at different times. In all of these cases, no-one has done anything wrong, but the impact on local search is tangible.
It’s a slightly different issue for new businesses. In the race to get their business listed wherever possible – and that’s smart – data is entered in a hurry and without consistency. One gets “Suite 4” and one gets “#4”. One gets “Airbnb” and the other gets “Air BNB”. These little inconsistencies become part of the internet’s perception of your business and then linger there, eroding your efforts to build authority, until they are fixed.
How Google Uses this Information
The local algorithm is Google’s attempt to reconcile as much information as possible about your business. It’s like a police detective questioning eyewitnesses. If ten witnesses give the same account, they are confident. If five don’t, confidence is lower and the investigator’s conclusion is less certain. If Google finds consistent NAP data on your Google Business Profile, your website, Yelp, Bing Places, local directories, trade directories and the like, it projects great confidence in your business and highlights it. Variability is like witness inconsistencies – you’re not necessarily disqualified, but you’re not as likely to be seen.
The thing to note is that Google doesn’t just make sure the information is matching. It’s checking whether it’s consistent from authoritative sources. If your NAP is consistent on 50 sources of low authority, that’s a waste of time when compared to consistency on a smaller number of highly authoritative sources. Google Business Profile is the most important. Next is your site, especially the contact page and the footer, where the NAP tends to be located. Then the big boys – Yelp, Facebook, Bing Places, Apple Maps – are important. These are the ones to tackle first, before delving into the long tail of directories.
The Audit: Checking Where You’re At
The first place to start is to understand the problem. A citation audit – which is really an audit of how your business information appears online – may sound like a lot of work, but it’s not as hard as it seems. Simply search Google for your business name. Look at each key platform individually: Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Bing Places, Apple Maps, as well as any industry-specific sites you can find for electricians. Make a record of each inconsistency, however minor.
There are software tools that will help you do much of this, searching multiple directories at once and reporting any inconsistencies with a master record that you supply. These are well worth using for initial audits and monitoring, as new invalid listings can pop up at any time as data aggregators republish information from other sources. Once fixed is not always fixed. The web is always changing, inaccurate information reappears and regular monitoring is the only way to keep up.
Not Curing the Problem
When errors are found, care must be taken to resolve them. It’s tempting to change everything all at once and as quickly as possible. The problem is that if you update too much too fast, especially on the most sensitive platform (Google Business Profile), it can lead to verification requests or short-term fluctuations in rankings. Update slowly, and prioritise the most trusted platforms first. Allow significant changes to be processed on each before moving on.
The Power of Doing It Right
Matching business listings don’t result in a sudden rankings boost. Results come more gradually. As Google sees matching data from more and more sources over weeks and months, it becomes increasingly confident that the information is accurate. This manifests in better and better visibility in the local pack, better placement in map listings, and better performance for “near me” searches, which bring the most direct and most valuable leads to local trade businesses.
There’s a snowball effect to this, as with other long-term SEO strategies. Every fixed listing builds on the last. Each new authority citation that matches your master NAP record adds to the authority of those that preceded it. The business that has been paying attention to this is in a better position than its competitor – it’s a better structure and it’s more difficult to shake because citation authority, once established on a consistent and clean foundation, is hard to knock out of the way fast. That’s the sort of local SEO advantage that stands up to algorithm shifts, competitor spending flurries and other search vagaries.
