NAP - effect of adding a word to the name of businesss

[reidsteven75]

Hello,

I'm faced with a decision which requires some feedback from experts like you.

My client has a business which has inconsistent citation submissions out the ying yang.  For examples sake their business is called "brand all types body repair", where "brand" is the parent company who owns my client's company,  and "all types body repair" is my client's company.

In most of their existing citations the phone number and address are all consistent, but some citations contain the name "brand all types body repair", and others just "all types body repair".

The name used on their website's NAP is "all types body repair"; however the name used on the larger directories like the BBB and yellow pages is "brand all types body repair".  Also since they are registered in the BBB as this, "brand all types body repair" is their legal business name.

Since they are registered in the BBB as "brand all types body repair" my thoughts are to ensure every citation uses this as the name.

Three questions come out of this:

1. I'm not really changing the name, only adding a brand word in front of the existing name.  Will this have less of an effect than changing the name completely?

2. If I change the name on their website from "all types body repair" to "brand all types body repair", will that have a negative affect on search rankings if some of the citations are already using "brand all types body repair"?

3. What would you do about the name issue?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Steve,

So glad my reply was helpful. Good for you for getting the NAP into compliance. You've done your client a major service.

[reidsteven75]

Hey Miriam,

Thanks for the response!

I ended up correcting all the business directories to the legal name and yes my rankings did drop; however they seem to have levelled out and now hopefully they will start increasing again.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Steve,

You need to go with whatever the legal business name or DBA is and then correct all citations to match this. It can be a lot of work, but considering that the recent David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 lists consistency of structured citations as the #3 ranking factor, this is about as important as anything can be!

You may need to re-verify some listings (particularly the Google+ Local listing) with the naming change, and yes, there may be a bit of a drop, but if you can get all citations into compliance, it should be uphill from there. I'd look at it this way: right now, the business is in a negative situation with citation inconsistency issues that, if fixed, could yield better future results for them.

Good luck with the work ahead!