I'm about to tell you something that sounds kind of boring, but is actually really easy to do and can give your search rank a boost!

Are you ready?

Use the same Name, Address, and Phone Number for your business everywhere online.

Yep. That's it. 

We call this NAP Consistency, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. Believe it or not, having the same information everywhere is extremely important to how Google ranks your site.

Why is this important?

The way Google works is it checks all over the internet to find information about your business and compares it to see if it’s the same. If your business name, address, and phone number are the same everywhere, Google feels confident that you're a legit business and its information about you is correct. Google believes in you, trusts you, and is happy to show your links more often because they like and trust you so much.

But sometimes business names, addresses, and phone numbers are NOT the same everywhere online.

You might have moved or changed your phone number over the years. Maybe your business name is a little different here or there. Or maybe one time your address got put in without the suite number or as a "road" instead of a "boulevard" when it was scraped up by yellow pages or wherever. There are a lot of reasons why your info may not be 100% consistent all over the whole internet without you knowing about it.

What can you do?

Decide exactly how your name, address, and phone number should be everywhere online.

Sounds like a no-brainer, but a lot of businesses struggle with this.

Is it Caitlin Reyes Photography, CR Photography, Reyes Photography, Caitlin Reyes Photographer, Caitlin Reyes, LLC…

Just pick one and always, always use that.

Claim your business & update your info.

If you haven't claimed your business on Google yet, it's a great time to do it now. It only takes a couple minutes, and it goes far to improve your reputation with Google and verify that all of your business information is correct.

Check your citations!

(Wait, what’s a citation?) It’s where you list your business’s contact info online.

Check all the places you know have your business name, address, or phone number. Double check your website, social media accounts, and online directories like wedding wire or yelp.

Scrub all of the old, inconsistent, or incomplete data you find.

You can also complete any profiles that are missing this information to make them more robust and appealing to your customers.

Last, make sure there's not any wrong information out there you don't know about. Moz has a great tool to check for incomplete, inaccurate, or duplicate information. Chances are, you’ll find yourself in places you didn’t even know you were!

There we have it! Checking your NAP consistency is something fairly quick and easy you can do to help solidify your reputation and rank in Google and give your business a little SEO boost. And it probably won’t take more than about 30 minutes to do!