What NAP format do I use if the USPS can't even find my client's address?
-
My client has a site already listed on Google+Local under "5208 N 1st St".
He has some other NAPs, e.g., YellowPages, under "5208 N First Street". The USPS finds neither of these, nor any variation that I can possibly think of!
Which is better? Do I just take the one that Google has accepted and make all the others like it as best I can?
And doesn't it matter that the USPS doesn't even recognize the thing? Or no?
Local SEO wizards, thanks in advance for your guidance!
-
Hi Raymond,
Good discussion going on here. In my opinion, first step with a client with a NAP consistency issue like this is to be sure that they do have at least one legit physical address and phone number. Not a P.O. Box or virtual address or what have you. Whatever the legit address is...that's the one to go with on all platforms. Then be sure that address is consistently implemented everywhere and clean up all citations that do not match. This can take some doing! Hang in there and hopefully you can put in the work to get this client to the primary goal of having a clean, consistent record. Good luck!
-
Hey, that's a nice offer!
I finally got the chance to ask the client about it today and guess what? It isn't found by the USPS because they don't deliver there! (We're talking about some weird anomaly in the USPS system, because this is north San Jose, in Silicon Valley! But the client said it's true.)
So now I'm definitely thinking just to roll with the one Google already likes. I think you and Bryan agree...?
Thanks both for the responses!
-
I agree with Bryan that it should match a confirmed address - however, if you want to PM me the full address, I'll try to find the USPS match for you. I don't mind doing some exploring.
-
I would recommend using whatever you have listed in your Google places account. As long as all the NAP (names addresses and phone numbers) are consistant with Google it will help you rank better in Google Places.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does creating too many parent pages damage my website's SEO?
I need to know how to keep my website structure well organised and ensure Google still recognises the key pages. I work for a travel company which needs to give customers various pieces of information on our website and this needs to be well organised in terms of structure. For example, customers need information on airport pick-ups and drop-offs for each of our destinations but this isn't something that needs to rank on Google. Logically for site structure would be to create a parent page: thedragontrip.com/transfers/india Is creating parent pages for unimportant content a bad idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicolewretham1 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
What was your experience with changing site url's?
I work with a company that is about to move to a new platform. Because the category and page structure is different every almost every url but the home page will need to be 301 redirected. I know how to do this and am pretty sure I will find and fix 99% ahead of time and not have too many 404's showing up in webmaster tools to clean up. My question is has anyone who is reading this post had to do this before and what was your experience with organic traffic after you made the switch. I am predicting that even if I successfully redirected 100% of the url's there would be some loss for a couple of months just due to the fact that we are making a major change. My bosses are asking if there will be any loss and I need to tell them what to expect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentH0 -
Weird rankings on my website, can't figure it out
Hey guys, One of my post popular pages for "Rust Hacks" use to be - http://www.ilikecheats.com/01/rust-cheats-hacks-aimbot/ Now when searching Google for site:ilikecheats.com rust hacks This page shows as the highest ranking - http://forum.ilikecheats.com/forums/221-Rust-Hacks-Rust-Cheats-Public-Forum What's weird is it seems the entire front end (Wordpress site) isn't ranking well anymore on page #1 of Google and the forums are ranking better currently. I did have a huge penalty from backlinks last year but cleared it. I got Yoast to do a site review and I'm cleaning up everything now. I also cleared most of the bad links via the disavow tool. Another example is when I search for "warz hacks" the forums show up in 4th place but the main website isn't showing at all back to page 10. If I search site:ilikecheats.com warz hacks the links directly to the main site doesn't show until page #2. So is this still a penalty that is carried over or is something else going on? Can't seem to figure it out, thanks in advance for looking. 😃 Any ideas what's going on and why the main pages no longer rank - http://www.ilikecheats.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Draden670 -
No matter what I do, my website isn't showing up in search results. What's happening?
I've checked for meta-robots, all SEO tags are fixed, reindexed with google-- basically everything and it's not showing up. According to SEOMoz all looks fine, I am making a few fixes, but nothing terribly major. It's a new website, and i know it takes a while, but there is no movement here in a month. Any insights here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wabash0 -
I'm afraid I may have messed up my site's organization
So I recently started working on an existing site for a company, and I'm afraid I may have done something to lose some backlinks. So to start off, say the website is www.domain.net and when I arrived domain.net and www.domain.net showed up as two separate sites so I changed my web.config file to direct all domain.net to www.domain.net The homepage was called default.asp, and I wanted the homepage to always show up as www.domain.net instead of www.domain.net/default.asp. Of course they both showed the same thing but I couldn't figure it out. So I removed www.domain.net/default.asp from indexing and changed the my internal links to the homepage to point at www.domain.net instead of simply pointing at the file default.asp. So now www.domain.net/default.asp still brings up the page, but I want it to revert to www.domain.net. I'm also a little worried because I noticed that one of my incoming links points at www.domain.net/default.asp and it doesn't get passed along to www.domain.net and I think i may have damaged my sites SEO I guess this is a very complicated and roundabout way of saying this, but how can I get www.domain.net/default.asp to take you to www.domain.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcrabill0 -
What's the best method for segmenting HTML sitemap?
Hello all, I was wondering if anyone can help me. Currently I'm trying to set up a HTML sitemap for our website and am having trouble with the 500+ pages of content under each category. How do you segment your HTML sitemap in a case like this, keeping in mind the less than 100 links per page rule? For example, http://www.careerbliss.com/salary/ allows our users to search salaries under company, job title, and location. You can imagine how many thousands of pages we need to represent. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Cheers! Reyna
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0 -
Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey0