You might wonder, “How can you mess up your business name, address, and phone (NAP) info?” I mean, it seems kind of obvious as long as you put the correct address, doesn’t it?
On local business websites, the pages you list your NAP information on matters. Also, since addresses can be listed in different ways, some parts of your address need to be listed consistently wherever it is online to be trusted.
If this sounds complicated, don’t worry, it’s not. Once you understand the basic principles, you won’t have any problem doing it correctly naturally. In this article, we will go over how and where to put your business NAP information on your local website correctly!
If you found this article because you are trying to learn local SEO, I have some overview articles you might want to read. They are “How To Do Local SEO – An In-Depth Overview!” and “What Is “On-Page” Local SEO?“. See also my articles: “Using Google Maps Correctly on Local Business Websites!” and “Why Include a Google Map in Local SEO?“
What NAP Format Is Best?
Different local business websites list their NAP information dissimilarly from business to business. For example, if you look at the first image in this article, a screenshot of the website footer NAP information of “South Denver Automotive,” their placement is quite different from the above website footer NAP information of McRae Bail Bonds from San Antonio, Texas.
There is no correct format for a business’s NAP information. Search engines like Google are smart enough to recognize it for what it is. However, the individual pieces of the NAP, such as the street address, business name, or phone number, must be listed consistently.
For example, if you include “Inc.” in your business name in one place online, it needs to be listed that way everywhere. The exception to this rule is with abbreviations. Google can now tell that Street and St mean the same thing.
Business NAP Info Next to Map
If you look at the above image, you will see McRae Bail Bond’s NAP info is next to its Google Business Profile (GBP) map. That is how I also like to do it on my client’s websites. I figure when people are looking for a business address, they might also want directions from the map. Plus, I think it just looks organized. So that is how I like to do it.
They do not have to be next to each other on the page. They should be on the same pages, though. But we will discuss more about what pages to list your NAP information.
Where To Put NAP Info on the Website
Single Location Businesses: If your business has a single location, such as “The Fighter Attorney, LeMond Law PC” from Lubbock, TX (in the above image), then you should list your NAP information on every page of the website.
When building websites for my local business clients, I usually put their NAP information along with their GBP listing map embed, both in the website’s footer and in the sidebar of any page with a sidebar.
Multi-Location Businesses: However, if your business is multi-location, you don’t want your NAP information from each location on every website page.
I have seen it work to list each location address in the footer of a multi-location business website, as long as they still had location pages for each location. And if each location’s schema markup, and usually the GBP listing map embeds, were kept strictly to the appropriate location page.
I have found that keeping the location information (i.e., map embeds, schema & NAP info) on just the location pages is better. Suppose the clients want all of their NAP information listed in the footer to be on every website page. In that case, I usually list it there as an image (except for phone numbers) rather than as text, and I don’t put the location data or GPS coordinates in the HTML data of the image.
I put each location’s schema markup, GBP listing map, and NAP information on their respective location pages. Then, it is the location pages that I link to in each location’s GBP listing.
One More Quick Tip
When I first learned local SEO, the teacher whose methods always got me the best results taught me this tip. It is to take your business address for each location, enter it into Google, and do a Google search of that address.
Google will then show you the address the way they list it in Google Maps. However, that is how you want to list the address on your website and all across the web in every business citation. Again, abbreviations no longer matter; Google is smarter than that now. But everything else you want to list identically on your website and across the web.
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