Local search
Local citations and NAP consistency: how to clean up your listings
Published by Zubair Afzal, responsible editor
First published Updated 6 min readWe check this page every three months. Next check: .
The basics
What a local citation is, and why NAP consistency matters
A local citation is any place outside your website that shows your business name, address and phone number, known as NAP. Directories, map apps, trade associations, review sites and local press all count.
Google’s help page on local ranking says local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence. Prominence is how well-known a business is, drawing on how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. The same page says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results. It doesn’t mention directory listings by name.
So there are two reasons to care. A map platform, an AI assistant or a directory has to match your business across many sources, which is easier when the details agree. And people copy your phone number and address from these listings, so a wrong one costs you calls.
What goes wrong
Five inconsistencies, from most to least costly
- An old phone number is still live on a busy listing
- Callers reach a dead line, a previous owner or a competitor. This one costs you something every day, so fix it first.
- An old address after a move
- Customers turn up at the wrong door, and map platforms may hold two locations for one business. Correct the listings you already have. Don’t create new ones.
- Duplicate listings on the same platform
- An earlier agency, a former employee or an automatic submission often creates these. They split your reviews and make it unclear which listing is the right one. Google’s guidelines allow one profile per location.
- The business name differs between platforms
- A trading name on one site, the legal name on another, keywords added on a third. Google’s guidelines say the name should match how the business appears in the real world, with no added keywords.
- Formatting differences
- Suite or unit, St or Street, with or without a country code. This is the lowest priority. Tidy them up when you’re editing a listing anyway.
The method
How to run a citation cleanup
Claim first, correct second, create last. Doing it in any other order is how cleanups end up creating new duplicates.
Write down your official details
One exact business name, one address in one format, one main phone number and one website address, matching your signage and Business Profile. Check every listing against this record.
You get: A one-line NAP record everyone uses
Fix your website and Business Profile
Put the details in your footer or contact page as plain text. If your site supports it, mark them up with LocalBusiness structured data. Then make your Business Profile match exactly.
You get: Two sources that agree
Find the listings that already exist
Search for your business name, your phone numbers (current and old) and your addresses (current and old). Note every listing on the first few pages of results, and what’s wrong with each.
You get: A list of listings, with what’s wrong on each
Correct the platforms customers use
Start with Apple Business Connect and Bing Places, then the directories and review sites that matter in your trade and country. Claim each listing before you edit it. Ask each platform to remove duplicates through its own process.
You get: Claimed, corrected listings with logins you own
Only then add new listings
Add listings on sites a customer might plausibly use. Stop when the next site on the list is one nobody in your market has heard of.
Check again after any change
A move, a new number or a rebrand means going through the list again. Keep your list of listings, so the next update takes an afternoon and not a week.
You get: An inventory kept with the business records
Keeping track
What to record for each listing
A simple spreadsheet is enough: one row per listing, with these columns.
- The site or platform, and the web address of your listing on it
- Whether you have claimed it, and which email address owns the login
- The name, address and phone number it shows today
- What’s wrong with it, if anything, and the date you asked for a fix
- Whether customers in your market use the site (yes, some or no)
- The date you last checked it
Priorities
Which listings deserve your time
| Dimension | Why it matters | Effort it deserves |
|---|---|---|
| Your Business Profile and website | Everything else gets checked against these, and customers see them most. | An exact match, always. |
| Other map platforms | Apple and Bing maps feed directions and assistants on phones and devices you don’t control. | Claim and correct them in the first week. |
| Trade and review directories | Customers in your sector compare options and copy numbers here. | The main ones in your trade and country. |
| General directories | Some visibility, mostly repeated elsewhere. | Correct them if they’re wrong. Add a few, not hundreds. |
| Mentions in articles | Press, blogs and partner pages. | Ask for a correction only where the old details send people to the wrong place. |
Rules of thumb
What to do, and what to avoid
Worth doing
- Keep one official NAP record and check every listing against it
- Claim existing listings before creating anything new
- Keep every login in an account the business owns
- Use a local phone number where you can, as Google’s guidelines recommend
Worth avoiding
- Adding keywords or place names to the business name on any listing
- Creating a second profile for a new address when you could edit the first
- Listing a virtual office or PO box as a location, which Google’s guidelines don’t allow
- Buying citations by the hundred from sites nobody in your market uses
Questions
Common questions about citations and NAP
What is a local citation?
A local citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on a site other than your own. That includes directories, map apps, trade association listings, local news stories and a supplier’s stockist page.
Some are listings you can claim and edit yourself. Others are mentions in an article, which you can only ask the site owner to correct.
Do citations still affect local rankings?
Nobody outside Google knows how much. Google’s help page names prominence as one of three bases for local results: how well-known a business is, including how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. It doesn’t mention directory listings or give them a weight.
The safer reason to keep listings consistent is practical: customers copy phone numbers and addresses from them. A wrong number on a busy directory loses calls, whatever it does to rankings.
Does the address format have to match character for character?
No. No sensible system treats "Street" and "St." as two different businesses. Spend your time on differences that change the meaning: a different suite number, an old address, an old or tracking phone number, or a different business name.
Should I pay for a citation-building package?
A one-off submission to the main data sources and platforms in your country can be worth paying for, because it saves time. A package priced by the number of directories buys volume with falling returns, and can create duplicates you then have to clean up.
Before you buy, ask which sites are included, whether they claim existing listings or create new ones, and who owns the logins afterwards.
We moved. What do we update first?
Update your Business Profile and your own website first. Then the other map platforms (Apple Business Connect and Bing Places), then the directories customers use in your trade, then everything else. Don’t create a second profile for the new address. Edit the one you have.
References
Sources for local citations
The official documents and research this page is based on. Platform rules change, so check the source before you act on a detail.
Related
Keep reading on local citations
- the full local SEO checklistWhere citations sit in the wider order of work.
- setting up each Business Profile field
- when the business is missing from Maps entirely
- consistency across many locationsThe same problem, multiplied by every branch.
- diagnosing weak local visibility
- NAP and other local search terms defined
- what structured data is, and what it isn’t
Start here
Want us to handle your listings?
Our local SEO service finds every listing that shows your details, fixes the ones that matter and keeps the list up to date when anything changes.
Rather check it yourself? Try our free SEO tools