Putting your business’s NAP info – name, address, phone – on your site is a basic step you take if you want to rank well in the local results.
It’s also common sense if you’re trying to attract local customers.
Still, I get questions all the time – questions about all the details. I’m hoping to answer them all in one breath.
Here are my 10 guidelines for putting NAP info on your site:
1. Must be crawlable text – that is, “readable” by Google and other search engines. That means it’s not OK to have it only as an image (for instance). My rule of thumb is if you can copy and paste it, it’s readable by the search engines.
2. Must match what’s on your Google Places page and citations – more or less. Don’t worry about little formatting differences – like “Ave” versus “Avenue,” or whether there’s a period after “Ave.”
3. Doesn’t have to be in Schema or in hCard, although there’s no reason not to mark up your NAP info that way. Still, plain old HTML is fine.
4. When in doubt about the formatting, refer to a Schema generator:
The one by TVS Internet Marketing
5. The NAP info can go pretty much anywhere on your pages / in your code. If you’re using WordPress or a similar platform, it can go in footer.php (my favorite), or in a sidebar widget. It can go in the table your content is in, or in the footer area. I wouldn’t suggest adding it to your title or description tags, though – usually a waste of space.
6. Don’t include links to pages on your website – unless doing so helps usability, like if you have a “Our Locations” page where you list all your locations.
7. If you have multiple locations, you can have all your NAPs on each page, or you can have just the NAP for Location A on the page for Location A, and so on. I’ve never seen problems with using NAPs on the same landing page or site-wide.
8. You can have the same NAP blob appear more than once on the page. I wouldn’t have it appear 8 times on a page. But 2 or even 3 times, sure.
9. It’s OK to style it with CSS, or to have it on one line.
10. If you run a home-based business and are extra-concerned about privacy, just leave off the street address – if you feel you must. But you should still include your business name, city, ZIP, and phone number.
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Any questions about NAP? Tips? Leave a comment!
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