What are local citations and why does NAP consistency matter?
Citations are the mentions of your name, address, and phone that Google cross-checks.
A citation is any online mention of your business name, address, and phone number, and consistency matters because Google uses those mentions to confirm that your business is real and located where you say it is. Conflicting information creates ambiguity, and ambiguity gets resolved against you.
What inconsistency actually costs
Consider a business that moved suites four years ago. The old suite number still sits in a dozen directories, three of which feed data downstream to others. Google now sees two addresses for one name. It has to pick, and its confidence in either drops. The visible symptom is usually not a dramatic ranking collapse. It is a business that never quite breaks into the map pack and nobody can explain why.
The same applies to a tracking phone number published in some places and the main line in others, to Street versus St, and to Suite 200 versus Ste 200. Pick one exact format for each field and use it everywhere.
The cleanup order
- First: your Google Business Profile, your own website, and your other major profiles such as Apple Business Connect and Bing Places.
- Second: the data aggregators that syndicate business information downstream. Fixing these stops bad data from regenerating.
- Third: the industry specific directories that your customers actually use. For a law firm that is the legal directories. For a contractor it is the trade and review sites.
- Last, if ever: the long tail of general directories.
The honest part about citation packages
Buying a package that blasts your NAP to 300 directories is mostly wasted money. Most of those sites have no audience and negligible authority, and if any of them ingest a wrong field you have manufactured new inconsistency. Fixing 20 wrong citations is worth more than creating 200 new ones. Audit first, correct what conflicts, and only then consider adding.
Related: Building local backlinks, What is in a local SEO program?, Does LevelUp offer SEO services?, SEO services.