NAP Consistency: Is Your Business Info the Same Everywhere?

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone: your business name, address and phone number. It's a common term in local SEO and its meaning is simple. These three pieces of information should be written the same way everywhere your business appears.

It sounds easy. In practice, when we check the details of a business that has been around for a few years, we often find at least one inconsistency.

Why are inconsistencies a problem?

Take this hypothetical example. A dental clinic appears on its website as “X Oral and Dental Health Polyclinic.” On Google Business Profile it's “X Dental Clinic.” On Instagram, “X Dental.” And on an old directory site, it's still listed with its previous address and a landline no longer in use, because the clinic moved two years ago.

A person would probably realize these are the same clinic. A search engine may not be sure. Google collects information about your business from different sources and compares them. If the details are consistent, confidence grows that the business is real and current. If not, there's uncertainty about which detail is correct.

The same broadly goes for AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for “a dental clinic in Kadıköy,” the answer may draw on several sources. If the sources disagree, the assistant may give the old phone number or not mention the business at all.

The most concrete harm is lost customers. Someone who calls the old number or goes to the old address may head to a competitor without trying again.

Finding where your details appear

Your business details probably appear in more places than you think. The main ones to check: your website's contact page and footer, Google Business Profile, Apple Maps and Yandex Maps, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, industry directory sites, booking and ordering platforms, and complaint and review sites.

To find the ones you've missed, search Google separately for your business name, your old and new phone numbers and your old address in quotation marks. Seeing which sites still show your old number is often surprising.

Setting a standard format

Before you start fixing, decide on a single correct version of these three details and write it down.

For the business name, use the name on your signage and official records. Adding keywords next to the name on Google Business Profile (“X Dental Clinic Kadıköy Implants”) breaks Google's rules and can get the profile suspended.

For the address, decide on abbreviations: “Mahallesi” or “Mah.”, “Caddesi” or “Cad.”? Google can usually handle minor spelling differences, but writing it the same everywhere reduces doubt. Write the building number, floor and unit in the same order too.

For the phone, pick one main number. Use it on your website, maps and directories. If you use separate numbers for campaigns or ads, don't put them in place of your main NAP details.

The audit and correction table

A simple table makes the work trackable. These columns are enough:

• Platform name and link
• The business name, address and phone listed there
• Whether it matches the standard format (yes or no)
• How to fix it: from your own account or by sending a request to the platform
• Date fixed and date checked

Fix the places under your own control first: website, Google Business Profile and social media accounts. Then move on to the most visible directories and platforms. Some directories take weeks to process correction requests, which is why the date-checked column matters.

Opening this table and going through the same list every time your address or phone changes is the easiest way to prevent future inconsistencies. If you're planning a move, a number change or a name change, prepare the table now.

NAP consistency is only one piece of ranking high on Google Maps. We collected review management, profile optimization and the other steps in our local SEO post. We also covered what you can do to appear correctly in AI assistants in a separate post.