Fun Fact: There are more than 1.86 billion websites online as of June 18th, 2021
1.86 billion websites! Let that sink in for a bit. When you consider starting a new business, the mere thought of competing with such a vast number of online presence is daunting. However, local SEO will help small enterprises to find their ground on the search engine.
The first and the most critical step forward is to rank on the local business listings in your area. This will help the business be visible to anyone looking for products or services related to the business’ offerings nearby.
Hiring a local SEO marketing company could be the best decision at this point. These companies offer bespoke services to get your business off the ground relative to local SEO rankings by using the necessary tools and strategies. However, before that, you need to understand the two most critical factors for local SEO – NAP and E-A-T.
Understanding SEO, NAP, and E-A-T
SEO is short for search engine optimization, and as you might already know, it involves optimizing a website to make it appear on SERPs for relevant search terms. To illustrate, an SEO company in Las Vegas would want to show up for the search term “SEO company in Las Vegas.” SEO is all about making this happen.
On the other hand, NAP is an acronym that stands for a business’s Name, Address, and Phone Number. A company must have consistent NAP details across various sources online to help build brand authority.
Speaking of authority brings us to our last acronym for this article. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. E-A-T is pretty self-explanatory and, as a ranking factor, is very important for a business. Potential clients and Google look at whether a company is a bonafide expert and trusted authority in the relevant field before pushing it high up in the ranking.
To NAP Is Paramount for Your Local Business
For any local business, online business listings are the core part of the digital marketing strategy. Having a Google My Business, Bing Places for Business and Yelp for Business listings are a must for any business looking to be discovered for their services in their locality.
Remember, these listings work as backlinks for your domain and boost your website’s authority on search engines. These listings work as endorsements for the business, and Google Search prioritizes such endorsements.
However, to be effective, all of these listings must have consistent information regarding your business. Any business listing or social media platform used by a company should have similar details and information to be ranked higher on trustworthiness. More importantly, your NAP details across all listings and social media must match the ones on your website.
The reason behind this is simple. Your business name, address, and phone number are the critical information that people might be looking for while searching for a relevant business in the area. Search Engines like Google aim to provide the most pertinent and accurate information to users.
As such, inconsistent NAP details might negatively affect your visibility and make it difficult for your business to appear in the list of local business queries.
Without NAP, Your Business Can’t E-A-T
Now that we know how the NAP is crucial for a local business, here’s how it affects E-A-T. To refresh your memory, E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. As we already know, Google intends to serve its users the best by showing the most accurate and reliable information related to their search queries.
Therefore, businesses with consistent NAP details, websites showcasing expert-level content created by subject matter experts, and a good amount of backlinks, will rank higher on a SERP. Any business that checks all of these boxes is held by search engines in high regard and will be shown front and center to the user.
However, the most crucial factor in E-A-T is displaying accurate NAP information on your website and everywhere else. These are the primary details being served to the user performing a local business search query. Imagine being provided a contact number, which returns an out-of-service message. How frustrating will that be?
Google, or any other search engine for that matter, wouldn’t want their users to face this, and inconsistent NAP will result in a business website being pushed lower in the ranking or even to the end of search results.
Here’s what you need to know about improving the visibility of your local business. For any business, authority and trustworthiness are essential factors to rank, and to achieve that, they should have their basic details in order across every listing. Consistency is the name of the game when it comes to local SEO ranking.
