Hi, everyone. Welcome to another one of our Whitefish Wednesday videos. My name is Chris Surridge. I’m the Director here at Whitefish Marketing. We specialize in help for the accounting sector throughout the UK. And today, we’re going to be bringing a very, very short video today to you in terms of localized SEO. So for those of you who can’t read this, don’t worry about it. We’re going to have it up on our blog post so you can see a much bigger version of this in due course. But I want to talk to you specifically about localized SEO and what NAP is. Or you might have heard of things such as the NAP protocol and words to that effect.
What is NAP?
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. It’s all to do with citations for your business. Now, a citation is like an online game of Snap. Google will go ahead and scan other websites and other directories. And if it sees a citation which matches your own website, then it plays a game of Snap and it says, “Yeah, that’s the citation, and I can see that as an element of trust there. I can see that the details there are correct.” And for that to happen, you need to make sure that you have the correct consistency of name, address, and phone number as displayed on your own website as it does across other third-party websites and other third-party directories.
So for example, on Yell.com, on Thomson Local, on 118.com, or whatever it might be, even your Google My Business page. You need to make sure that your name, address and phone number is consistent with what you’re displaying on your own website. This means things such as, if you have, for example, in our case, Whitefish Marketing Limited, if I wanted to include the word limited, I have to make sure I’m either using Ltd or the actual full word limited on each instance that I’m actually going off and using it.
Let’s talk about Citations
So one thing that we want to talk to you about is there are lots of different versions of your citations that will be floating around out there. It’s just nature that you’ll have different versions of your citations floating around there in the ether and on the internet. But having different versions out there and inconsistency shows an element of a lack of trust for Google. So you want to go ahead and correct these. One of the best tools, go ahead and use that, is Moz Local. Moz Local is a great tool for you to go ahead and search for inconsistencies within your citations, and then subsequently you can go away and fix them.
So with your citations, where else can you get citations from? You can go to Moz Local. You can go ahead and search that. You can have a look at competitors, see where their citations are appearing. Again, using Moz Local for something like that. Or failing that, you can go ahead and do it manually yourself. You want to choose citations by two things. Category and by city. So you want to find the correct categories or directory listings in particular categories. For accountants, for example, you want to go ahead and find accounts directories and post up there. Or by city. So for example, if you were living here in Folkestone where we are, we have Folkestone TownTalk which is a formal directory for the local folks and the Folkestone community. You want to go ahead and post up there as well.
All these citations help with your localized SEO. We have another video where we talk about the four core elements of SEO and what makes for good SEO, on-page, off-page, local, and technical. This is very much all about the local SEO aspect of it and about your citations. So citations or directory listings, whatever you want to call them, are a core, core, core element of your localized SEO. But you must ensure that your name, address, and phone number are correct and consistent across all of your listings. And, of course, on your website as well.
Check your own Contact Us page
One thing, do check your own website as well on the contact us page. Check to make sure you have actually included the name, address, and phone number. Most people just add the phone number. They don’t actually think to consider adding in the full name of the business and the address as well in there. But go ahead and place it up there on the contact us page. And that will be a great place for Google to go ahead and tag and recognize.
Also do include your name, address, and phone number as well in localized schema tags as well. I’ll leave you to go and research that. I’m not talking about schema tags today. But do try and go ahead and upload name, address, and phone number in local schema tags as well.
That’s it for now. It’s just a very, very short video, talk to you about the benefits and the importance of citations within SEO and the consistency that you have to go ahead and drill down to. Any questions, as always, feel free to drop us an email, hello@whitefishmarketing.co.uk. Just drop us a line and we’re happy to have a chat with you about anything to do with digital marketing. For now, that’s me and I shall see you on the next video. Many thanks. Bye.
