NAP Correction Services

Online Business Listing Management Services
Internet Yellow Page (IYP) Listing Correction
Name, Address, Phone (NAP) Cleanup Services

Here’s What Orion Will Do For You

• Create a baseline listing inventory
• Stop bad data from propagating immediately
• Fix incorrect data throughout the Web
• Report on the corrections made

Continue reading to understand how improper structured citations can hurt your reputation, search engine rankings and sales… and learn what you can do to fix it!

How Does an Organization’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP Info) Get Distributed Throughout the Web?

There are hundreds of locations online where an organization’s address and phone number can be listed. To start, the following is a brief history and an explanation on how an organization’s business contact information might be spread around the Web.

When a new company is formed by a business owner and it is registered with the government it can easily find its way into various data providers’ databases. Data providers around the world buy these databases (sometimes old and outdated databases) and publish them in their directories. These listings are meant to help consumers find companies in their local area.

In years past, where traditional printed Yellow Pages dominated, one only had to call the phone company to update new contact info for a business. In the modern days, where Internet-based business directories copy or scrape business listings from other websites or buy large databases from major data providers, it has become increasingly harder to update business contact information on all the possible places it is found listed online.

Not All Listings Accurately Represent the Organization’s Current Business Information

If a business is incorrectly listed in the database of even one of these major players, it can spread across the Internet like a weed that can be difficult to eradicate. Business data aggregators gather company names, addresses and phone numbers from various sources and often combine it with other information, such as the type of business (category), website URL, hours of operation, etc, to create a profile of information that can even include a company logo and reviews of the business. These profiles can present a company’s prospective customer with conflicting information if it is not consistently represented everywhere it appears.

Because there are so many online locations where an organization’s address can be listed, there is a high likeliness that not all listings will accurately represent the organization’s current business name, address, telephone number or website URL. This incorrect data can also show up in search engine results pages.

Consistency is the Key to Business Listing Success

Succeed online with correct & optimized business listings!

Even if the local listing is claimed and updated by a business owner, Google is well known for improperly changing a business’ listing data based on information it harvests from other authoritative online sources. Thus, it is important to ensure a consistent NAP format is always used everywhere online. This would include placing proper business information on an organization’s own web properties as well as their various social media profiles such as their Facebook Business Page or LinkedIn Company Page.

Next, we’ll explain how an organization benefits from ensuring their online citations are accurate.

Benefits of Fixing Online NAP Information

There are several benefits of a having uniform NAP presence online. Having a consistent record of a company’s contact information online can positively affect a company’s branding strategy and contribute to search engine optimization of a business’ website.

How Branding and Reputation Factors into the Equation

• it looks better for potential customers (appears more professional & trustworthy)
• it can help to avoid confusion as to where a business is located (proper address)
• it can ensure that leads via phone calls reach the business (proper phone number)
• it helps to strengthen a brand (consistent/correct name)

Better Visibility in the Search Engine Can Be Achieved

An additional benefit of our listing correction service is better visibility in the search engines. If all other factors are equal, a potential ranking boost can be achieve over competitor websites if a business has a consistent representation of their name, address and phone number. Having more and proper structured and unstructured citations can create a higher level of trust and authority for a company’s website in the search engines.

Having a proper NAP presence online:

• prevents bad data from being propagated
• minimizes the possibility of duplicate listings being created (explained below)
• lessens the likelihood that Google would change a proper listing based on outdated/incorrect info it harvests from other sources

Preventing Duplicate Listings

We have seen many cases where a company name appears several different ways within the same business directory. Combined with multiple publicized phone numbers and old business locations, this can cause up to 5 or 10 duplicate listings on just one venue for some of our clients.

Variations on a company name might look like this:

• ABC Widget Company Incorporated
• ABC Widget Co Inc
• ABC Widgets
• ABC Widget Sales

If a company moved locations over the years, they may have multiple addresses such as:

• 123 Main Street, Milwaukee, WI
• 9876 S Passing Ln, Waukesha, WI

A company may have more than one phone line which can result in their alternative phone numbers getting thrown into the listing mix, too:

• 555-555-0100
• 555-555-0101
• 555-555-0102

With 4 different name variations, 3 publicized phone numbers and 2 different addresses in their operation history, a company could theoretically end up with 24 unique NAP listings!

In some cases, two out of three NAP data points must be different within an IYP venue for a listing to be considered a unique business. In reality, that means that two companies can exist at the same address with different phone numbers and they would be considered a unique businesses, which is a good thing, because businesses often share office complexes.

However, if a single company has two different phone numbers listed online and uses the same address everywhere, but there are even just two slight variations in the business name, an IYP may think it is a whole different business and duplicate listings can be created from scraped data.

Updating a single listing on an IYP venue  is a step in the right direction, however the existence of duplicate listings must be taken into consideration when performing business listing cleanup online.

One good reason to avoid having duplicate IYP listings created is so that customers have just one main listing where they can leave reviews. (Reviews can help the search engines determine how your website should rank, as well.)

Our Solution

Name, Address & Phone Number Cleanup (NAP Correction) Service

Our NAP correction process can be summarized as follows:

• Assess the situation to create a baseline & listing inventory
• Stop bad data from continuing to propagate throughout the Web
• Fix incorrect data throughout the Web
• Report on efforts and corrections made

Explained in more detail, over the course of a few months, Orion Group will perform an extensive cleanup of the organization’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information in the various online business listing aggregators and IYP (Internet Yellow Page) venues.

We will perform an in-depth audit to determine the severity of the incorrect data found online. We will document our findings in order to take a full inventory to be used as a baseline and for reporting purposes.

Our first priority is to correct the organization’s business address in major data aggregators, such as Localeze, InfoGroup, Acxiom, and Factual. Once the data in the main aggregators is cleaned up, improper business information will stop propagating down to their partner websites around the Web.

Orion Group will then manually create, claim or update the organization’s NAP info on other popular IYP (Internet Yellow Page) websites. The end goal is to have the correct NAP information listed in all of the most popular online directories.

Our promise to our clients is that we will put in the time and effort required to contact the IYP sites and also to follow up with them regarding the requested corrections and deletions of outdated duplicate listings. Keep in mind that because we are at the mercy of the listing companies’ webmasters or tech support team, we can not guarantee that every listing can be corrected.

We will also perform NAP optimization of the organization’s website. The ‘Contact Us’ page will be tweaked to meet SEO industry best practices. We will embed the proper Google Map of the business listing as well as ensure that the NAP information contains geo-coded schema markup.

Our business listing correction service process consists of several phases:

• Audit – To determine the depth of the problem and declare the scope of work
• Phase 1 – Major aggregator & Google/Yahoo/Bing Local correction
• Phase 2 – Yext PowerListing sync of 55+ venues (while ensuring duplicate listings aren’t created)
• Phase 3 – Thorough correction of remaining bad listings and building of new citations
• Phase 4 – Optimization of NAP on client’s website ‘Contact Us’ page

Because Phase 1 typically prevents incorrect data from propagating further and updates the business info on a few of the largest venues and Phase 2 corrects improper business data across a large number of popular IYP (Internet Yellow Page) venues simultaneously, we suggest subscribing to a minimum of Phase 1 & 2 for most clients in order to achieve good results in a short period of time.

Depending on the desire of our client, we perform Phase 3 to attempt the complete eradication of improper NAP data online. At times there may be additional IYP venues (such as niche vertical directories) that are not covered in the Phase 2 that should also be updated. This can be especially important for doctors, lawyers or other professionals where specialty business directories exist for their industry.

As some IYP venues will not update their listing information for a business if the company’s own website displays different NAP information, Phase 4 is often necessary. This will improve the IYP listing correction process and help to align the client’s web property with current SEO standards.

DIY or Professional Expertise?

Business Listing Correction Services by Orion Group LLC

A business owner may attempt to undertake this immense and complicated project his or her self, or perhaps dedicate an employee to perform the tasks, however it takes many hours of detail oriented work to pull off. We find that, in most cases, expertise is necessary to ensure that the process is completed thoroughly and properly.

Finding contact information for the webmasters of each venue that has incorrect information and contacting them is a lot of tedious and time consuming work with follow up often required. Let Orion Group take care of this data correction process for you. We have the experience to ensure it is done right the first time.

Contact us now to get a quote to change your online business listings. Let us help you update your internet directory listings right away!