If your business address is changing, read on to learn about how to ensure your Google local pack rankings don’t plummet.
If you are a business owner or representing a business and don’t know what NAP means, you need the help of Webolutions’ SEO experts.
NAP stands for Name Address Phone. It is important to have a consistent NAP because it helps a website to rank higher in local pack results. An inconsistent NAP sends mixed signals to search engines like Google and BING, which results in some confusion and potentially lower Google search engine rankings.
A drop in local pack rankings, or at best a temporary fluctuation, can result when a business changes their physical address. The ability to recover from an address change can be expedited with proper local SEO. You may wish to seek professional local SEO services from Webolutions to help recover from a drop-in rankings related to a change of address.
While local pack rankings in Google are impacted by several factors, the most important element for ranking well in Google’s local results is to have a consistent name, address and phone (NAP). One’s NAP must be updated across the internet. This can be a challenging and frustrating process, particularly if a company has hundreds of local citations.
A local citation is simply a listing found elsewhere on the internet referencing your company’s name, address and phone. It may contain additional information like website address, company description, number of employees, revenue of company, etc.
This sounds simple, however, unless you’ve done this before, it can be quite overwhelming. There are so many different places that may list your business, finding all of them can be difficult.
So, how does one achieve a listing of all local citations? Your best bet is to hire an SEO company like Webolutions to take care of this for you, including all of the address updates across all of the business citations.
If you are adventurous and would like to find your business citations, there are a few services and/or tools that will help. Among the most popular citation tools are:
(please note the above link will take you to the spyfu website)
All business citations are not created equal. Some of your citations have greater “value” than others. When updating to a new address, you will want to start with the most important websites. These websites typically have greater authority and trust and, therefore, pass along more value to your website’s rankings.
To help you prioritize, we provide you the most important citations, listed in descending order of importance.
Citation Website | DA | Citation Website | DA | |
plus.google.com | 100 | spoke.com | 60 | |
yelp.com | 100 | factual.com | 59 | |
mapsconnect.apple.com | 100 | ibegin.com | 58 | |
bing.com | 97 | 2findlocal.com | 57 | |
foursquare.com | 94 | tupalo.com | 56 | |
houzz.com | 90 | ratemds.com | 55 | |
yellowpages.com | 86 | brownbook.net | 54 | |
angieslist.com | 85 | cylex-usa.com | 54 | |
manta.com | 83 | homestars.com | 52 | |
switchboard.com | 82 | where2go.com | 50 | |
merchantcircle.com | 81 | magicyellow.com | 49 | |
whowhere.com | 79 | ezlocal.com | 49 | |
superpages.com | 78 | hub.biz | 48 | |
tomtom.com | 76 | bizhwy.com | 46 | |
whitepages.com | 76 | the-dispatch.com | 46 | |
directory.wfaa.com | 76 | salespider.com | 45 | |
kudzu.com | 71 | wand.com | 45 | |
local.com | 69 | iglobal.co | 44 | |
aboutus.org | 67 | lacartes.com | 44 | |
worldweb.com | 66 | cybo.com | 44 | |
rateitall.com | 64 | localpages.com | 44 | |
hotfrog.com | 63 | totallylocal.com | 42 | |
411.com | 63 | chiefmall.com | 43 | |
chamberofcommerce.com | 63 | company.fm | 41 | |
linktown.whas11.com | 62 | yasabe.com | 41 |
The final step is to update all existing citations from the old address to the new location. When done manually, this can be a very time consuming process, especially if there are hundreds of local citations. Additionally, understanding how to navigate each citation website and enter the required information can be confusing and frustrating.
If you would like help updating your local citations, Webolutions can do this for you. Give us a call: 303-300-2640
For more than 27 years, we've worked with thousands (not an exaggeration!) of Denver-area and national business leaders to help them achieve their business goals. Are YOU ready to take your website and business to the next level? We're here to inspire you to thrive. Connect with Webolutions, Denver's leading web design and digital marketing agency, for your FREE consultation with a web development expert.
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