Is SEO effect of NAP Inconsistency A Hoax?

[MrSem]

Is the effect of NAP inconsistency on search rankings basically a myth to justify business citation management services? I've been doing SEO for over 10 years but only recently started doing local businesses. I have yet to find any sort of published study that clearly shows a significant ranking effect by correcting an inconsistent NAP on any business directory site other than Google and Bing Business Listings. In fact, the publishers of any such articles claiming NAP inconsistency has a significant negative SEO effect are almost always businesses or people that are charging for such services. Gee, could they be a little biased?

Obviously if you have an incorrect address that is far from the actual address, correcting it will help your ranking (think 3-pack) in the area close to your business but that's not really the type of ranking effect I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about a missing suite #, or an old address that is 1/2 block away from the new address but still the same phone number, or identical address but different phone (a toll free versus a local number). That kind of stuff.

Of course you don't want to have an incorrect address or non-working phone number on places like Superpages, Yelp, Yellowpages, etc, but does anyone know of any place I can find good factual proof that having inconsistent NAPs on these sites has any significant effect on rankings? I'm sure some of the big SEO companies have the data to determine the effect. Or is this more of a "tin foil hat" / herd / OCD mentality on this subject that no one can prove (or disprove?)

[MiriamEllis]

Hi MrSem,

Yes, the limitations you've pointed out are, unfortunately, baked into the environment. There's no way to prove impact in a vacuum. You can't stop competitors from making changes on their end that could be positive or negatively impacting the rank of your business at the same time that you are cleaning up your citations. Search results are so dynamic, it's rarely possible to be 100% positive in stating causation, with no margin for error, because even if you can control what your company is doing, you can't control what competitors are doing in the same time frame, or as you mention, a Google update occurring in that time frame, or even a bug. So, basically what you have is industry practitioners over time noticing apparent cause and effect. When practitioners state that citation cleanup appears to impact search visibility, it's based on more formal studies like Andrew's (above) and on what they notice across the board with clients, over time.

As for what is actually being cleaned up, that's easier to define. It's going to be resolving inconsistent NAP+W, hours of operation, categories and duplicates, much of the time. It can also include remedying incompletions.

I understand your skepticism. Toothpaste manufacturers have a vested interest in telling you their product will make your teeth whiter. But there's an important difference here that shouldn't be overlooked: the things we've come to think of as local search ranking factors originate in the early study of local search results being performed in the trenches by very small agencies. Going back more than a decade, you can read through the blogs of folks like Mike Blumenthal, sharing what they are discovering moves the needle, client by client. That's not quite the same as the toothpaste company, because the scale was very small at the dawn of Local. You could chalk the corpus of local-related blog posts over the past 12 or so years up to being mere sales pitches, but I think if you start reading backward from 2017, you'll see it really wasn't that way. Just as in organic SEO, it's been a voyage of discovery

[MrSem]

It's nice to see there is at least something out there.  However both articles lack the necessary details about the work that was done to lend them credibility in my eyes. The first one is just a graph. There's several flaws.

The first one  I already mentioned but I'll discount it since there's no way around it. And that is, there could be a gazillion reasons why the rankings of those businesses went up that have nothing to do with making the citations more consistent.  I don't see any major algo updates during those periods though so that's good - so I'll give the benefit of the non-doubt here.  And I'll have to also go on a limb that there were no significant changes in the backlink profile and the website content of the majority of the properties used in these assessments - realistically, there probably was, but let's disregard it for argument sake.

Here's the missing piece - what types of NAP changes were made?  Specifically, I'd want to know what percentage of the NAPs where the city was changed, were they changed to a more densely populated area which naturally will get more 3-pack/map user impressions?

I'd say without someone like the new Matt Cuts confirming it's a significant ranking factor, it's still a mystery.  Those two reports of course were put out by companies that sell Local SEO services. (But who else would take the time to do them? LOL)

I think the bottom line is improving the consistency of your NAPs can only help your business.  But I think claims about it having a significant effect on organic rankings are still far from proven.

[MiriamEllis]

Great question, MrSem! Now, full disclosure: I do work for Moz and we do have Moz Local, and I want to validate your comment about not feeling certain whether you can really trust statements made by folks who offer citation management as a service. I can see why you'd feel that way - makes sense to ask a question like yours. So, if even given my work here at Moz, you can still find some value in my explanation of the role of location data management, I'd like to take the time to reply.

Here's one case study you might like to look at, in which Local SEO Guide fixed 8000+ citation issues for a retailer with 1,300 branches, with a documented increase of 23% in Google local pack visibility across 6000 tracked keywords: http://www.localseoguide.com/our-work/case-studies/local-retailer-citation-cleanup/

Here's another in which Mockingbird saw a 27% increase in traffic following citation cleanup using both Moz Local and Yext: https://mockingbird.marketing/mockingbird-case-study-local-optimization-nap-cleanup/

You can find other studies like this, and Moz has done some internal case studies of its own with customers where we've seen similar numbers resulting from citation/duplicate cleanup.

When it comes to citations, I think of their role in two ways:

1. We know Google draws data from a variety of sources. If Google is drawing in bad data about your business, it's not a good thing. So, this is on the SEO side of things: defending your Google presence by ensuring that the sources Google draws from are accurate and trustworthy.

2. From a consumer standpoint, bad data is a trust and revenue killer. One Placeable study found that a whopping 73% of consumers lose trust in a brand if its listings contain misinformation (https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2338839/73-lose-trust-in-brands-due-to-inaccurate-local-business-listings-survey). And, you have only to experience the annoyance of calling an out-of-service phone number or arriving at the vacated building of a business that has moved to form a very negative impression of a local brand.

For me, point #1 is table stakes in Local SEO. Between the numbers in studies like the ones I've linked to, and my own experience of seeing Google pull wrong data from various places, a clean citation profile is a must in a competitive market. But, beyond this, it's that 2nd point that really gets me: if you miss out on "being there" at a consumer's point-of-decision because your listing on Citysearch or Yelp or Foursquare is incorrect, who knows how much revenue you've just lost? Some statistics say that a customer is worth 6-7 times as much as the dollar amount of his initial purchase. So, you may not just be missing out on one $60 sale of a yoga mat. You could be missing out on $420 dollars of sales over time. You might not only be missing out on a single purchase of a $4,000 engagement ring; you could be losing $28,000 in lifetime sales. So, for sure, you want to be in the right places, at the right moment, with the right data.

Hope these thoughts are helpful, and that others in the community will join this interesting discussion. It's a good one!

[Moreleads]

I have read those same countless articles but can´t think of any study on it, neither any respectable person in the industry elaborating on it.  We pay attention to maintaining consistency in the NAP´s  (don´t sell it as a service though) just as good business practice and always had the idea it would be good for SEO as well. Now i am not so sure if there is any impact there.

When i see people mentioning ".. even the slightest variations...will hinder a search engine´s confidence" my hairs standup as i have seen over time that many NAP´s from clients have natural variations, sometimes parts of the address are abbreviated, order of words changed, a small insignificant part of the address omitted, phone numbers with international codes and without, with extensions and without, Names with Ltd and without.  Doesn´t make any sense to me that these would already hinder the search engines´s confidence as they are natural (google always claims to like natural).

Very interested to see if someone will come up with a credible source for this

[MrSem]

I've probably read the same "countless articles" but none of them even referenced any anecdotal evidence, let along a careful study.  I agree the study would be difficult because in the time between correcting the NAPs and the search engine picking up the corrections everywhere, there could be other factors that affect your ranking.  But if you are doing SEO for 100 local businesses, then you can pretty much determine with some degree of certainty whether it's essentially a myth or not.

So a "published study" to me might be someone like Brighlocal, say... We took 20 local business clients with NAP inconsistencies and monitored their rankings for two weeks on a daily basis and took the 10 of those 20 with the least variation in daily rankings and submitted corrections to their NAPs at the same time using the same method.  We performed no other on-page or off-page SEO for the next x weeks.  At the end of the "study" the rankings of the 10 businesses changed as follows....

Now of course there's still going to be external factors that can affect the ranking but  over time if you looked at similar data for more and more businesses you could be able to present fairly clear data that it makes a difference.

I've been doing Internet Marketing for almost 20 years and over that length of time you gain increased wisdom and gut instinct on things.  I'm not saying I can prove the NAP corrections make no significant difference in your ranking, but from all the articles I've read, the claims sure seem a bit fishy.  I've seen this before in other industries.  The presentation of misinformation, that on the surface makes sense, but really is just designed to make people think they need a product or service. That's the downside of the Internet, anyone can make any claim without basing it in actual fact.  Gee, the term "fake news" comes to mind.

Maybe if you could point to one of the countless articles written by someone very well respected in the industry I can pose the question "Specifically how were you able to determine that?"

Actually here's an article I ran across recently. Not sure how I stumbled on it and definitely wouldn't consider the author a widely respected publisher.  But he says:

https://www.stlouisdigitalmedia.com/blog/local-seo/what-is-nap-consistency/

"when search engines are crawling the web they can – and will – notice even the slightest variations in a business name, address, phone number, and/or website address. These variations can hinder a search engine’s confidence."

Okay, the first thing that popped into my head when I read this is "what specifically are you referring to regarding _confidence_ and how does that affect my organic ranking if the address and phone are correct but vary slightly from my other listings?"

Or, tell me why this matters so much and how you determined this?  Oh, you offer Local Search Marketing Services! Great! I can pay you to help me avoid the issues you are eluding to!

My gut is telling me using general descriptions like "hinder a search engine's confidence" means this author either is basically regurgitating something he heard elsewhere, also with no detailed justification, or is just making stuff up for the purpose of generating business.

Is everybody so sure the Emperor is actually wearing clothes?

[TaylorRHawkins]

I'm not sure what dictates a "published study," but I have read countless articles on how important maintaining consistent NAP-info on business listings. But I'm interested in seeing what other people have to say, so I'll comment to follow this thread.