Nitpicky NAPS Local Question

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I'm about to setup all our NAPS for our Tampa office with Moz Local, and I'm curious about one small thing: suite vs ste? I have read that what matters most is consistency, but since I haven't set it up yet, if anyone had any experience with full names being written out doing better/worse than abbreviations?

Thanks,

Ruben

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ruben,
I hope you'll just love Moz Local!

Yep, it looks like that # thing is everywhere. When, exactly, this happened, I did not notice.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Miriam!

Funny you mentioned that last part. When deciding what to do earlier, I did a search and saw the same thing. Of all the local results, only one had suite in them. The others all had the # instead, so I figured I would just change everything to match that.

Thanks everyone!

Ruben

P.S. Excited to get start with Moz Local!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ruben,

Suite vs. Ste. does not matter. Nor does Ave. vs. Avenue, St. vs Street, etc. What needs to be consistent is the numbers and spelling of your street address, but abbreviations like the above do not matter.

Interestingly, it just came to my attention this morning that Google appears to have made a recent change in how they are displaying second line data. Instead of suite or unit, everything seems to have been replaced by the # sign. Go do some searches and see if you see this, too. A little change!

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Thanks for the response. One quick follow-up, when you said you "would write your address as completely as possible" are you talking about writing out the standard abbreviations, (blvd, st, e, w) as well, or just the ones that aren't super common like "ste" in this case?

I really appreciate the insight and your time.

Thanks again,

Ruben

[Highland]

There's a couple of things at play here. First off, there's a principle I hold which is "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right". Now abbreviations aren't wrong but they're inferior to the full word. So even if there's no penalty for doing so, I would write it all out. You're talking 2 more letters to remove any ambiguity in this case. I would write your address as completely as possible.

Second is that Google is likely to normalize the address anyways. I've noticed more and more places that do that. There's a growing number of APIs that can do that for you as well. If Google isn't normalizing them now, expect it to happen in the future.