Citations are listings for your business or organization on websites like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Yelp, and many others.
NAP stands for Name Address Phone number. While your NAP is part of your citations other details are too like your category, website, social media sites, and description. If your business has moved or changed phone numbers you may have a mix of this information on the web. Hopefully you don’t have a wrong category but I’ve seen it. Sometimes this information seems to just keep coming back even after you think you have it all updated.
Keep your citations consistent.
It’s good for SEO but also good for customers trying to find you. The last thing you want is them finding you and having the phone number, address or website being wrong cause then they haven’t really found you.
Check your citations
First see how bad it is. Maybe your are good and all citations are consistent.
Moz has a free tool for checking what it considers your local citations. Some of these aren’t 100% local for example Facebook but the Moz.com Check My Business Listing tool is a good place to see what your citations look like.
You can also do Google searches for your business to make sure everything you find has your current information. Searches like “business name”, “current-address”, “current-phone-number”, “miss-spelled-business-name”, or “old-address” “old-phone-number”.
Update your citations
If you find some citations that are incorrect you next need to decide are you going to contact each site and get them to update the citation or use a service like Moz local.
My recommendation is if you have a few that are incorrect just contact the sites directly and get the citations updated and if it’s a mess consider using Moz’s service. I’ve used it. It’s decent but not perfect partially because sometimes some of the large data aggregators for no apparent reason update your citation with old/bad info and Moz can’t keep them from doing this but they can help you to fix it if this happens.
Monitor
Keep a watch to make sure they get updated and stay that way. The major data aggregators feed other sites and it can take awhile for them to get updates or worse they may create duplicate entries instead of updating your citations.
Close duplicate listings
Watch for and close duplicate listings when they come up. The Moz local service can help with some of these but not all of them and it may not find all of them. It can be a hassle but the sites will have a way to remove the duplicate. It’s unusual but you may just need to contact them if a form isn’t available. Some will point your towards a service that is a bit expensive which I have an issue with. I haven’t no intentions of paying someone to stop providing bad information especially since this eliminates any incentive to have good data in the first place.
Wrong category that keeps coming back?
If this happens I have a post about a category that kept coming back. Read it