Your name, address and phone number, usually shortened to NAP, are what a search engine uses to decide that all the scattered mentions of your business across the web belong to one company. When they match exactly, every mention adds confidence. When they do not, each variation becomes a separate candidate and the confidence splits between them. It sounds like a tidiness issue. It is actually one of the cheapest ranking improvements available to a local business.
What counts as a difference
More than people expect. Suite 750 and Unit 750 are different. A phone number written with brackets in one place and dashes in another is different. A business name with Inc on the website and without it on a directory is different.
Not every variation does equal damage, and search engines are reasonably good at working out the obvious ones. But every difference is a small piece of work you are asking a machine to do, and a small chance it gets it wrong.
The postal code is worth checking carefully. A single wrong letter can place your address in a different city's postal zone entirely, which is not a small error at all.
Where to fix it, in order
Your own website first, because everything else is checked against it. Put the address in one place in the code and pull it in everywhere, so the footer, the contact page and the structured data can never disagree.
Your Google Business Profile second. This is the one that has to match your website exactly, including the suite number.
Then the directories: the large ones, the national ones for your country, your industry ones, and any local chamber or association listing.
Then the ones you forgot. Old listings from a previous address are the usual culprit, and they are often the ones creating the conflict.
A quick way to find the bad ones
Search for your phone number in quotation marks. Every page that carries it comes back, and the ones showing an old address or a different business name are your list.
Do the same with your business name and with your street address. Each search finds a different set.
Fix what you control, and ask for the rest. Most directories have a correction form, and most act on it within a few weeks.
Then stop changing it
Once one exact version exists, write it down and use it for everything: invoices, email signatures, social profiles, new directory listings.
The work of cleaning this up is genuinely tedious and only has to be done once. Doing it again in two years because somebody typed the address from memory is avoidable.
Questions people ask
- Does a suite number really matter?
- It matters for matching. If your website says Suite 750 and your Google profile says only the street address, those are two slightly different addresses being compared. It is a two minute fix and there is no reason to leave it.
- What about my old address from a previous office?
- Hunt it down and update it. Old listings are the most common source of NAP conflict, and they are also the ones most likely to send a customer to a place you left years ago.
We do this
If you would rather have it done than do it, this is the part of what we offer that covers it.