A business owner changed their company structure from LLC to S-corp, which altered their name in NAP (Name, Address, Phone). They forgot to update it everywhere: their website, Google Business Profile, and citation sites. Google got confused and their rankings dropped from page 1 to page 3. A three-day audit and BrightLocal fixed it.
What is NAP? It's not what babies do, and it's not what old people do in the middle of the afternoon. It actually stands for name, address, phone number. You'll see that a lot when you're looking around in the whole SEO world, website world. They'll say, make sure your NAP is consistent everywhere. That's what they're talking about— name, address, phone number. But it also is everything else to do with your location. So it can be your email address, your physical address, your mailing address, your phone number, your fax number, your business name, your name, and they have to be consistent everywhere. And you might think, oh, it's no big deal. So let me tell you a story. Last year I changed my business from an LLC to an S corp, so I thought Like you, no big deal. You remove the LLC, you put an INC, and who cares? Done. So I did that in November on my website, and I just thought, as I come across things online, I'll log in and change it. It's no pressure. Whenever I come across it, I'll just change it and over time it'll all be changed. That's what went through my mind. I didn't realize. It is a big deal. It's part of the NAP. Remember, name, address, phone number. What happened? And I share this so that you, this won't happen to you. What I'm about to share will happen if you change any piece of your NAP, any piece of it. I changed it on my website. I didn't change it in my schema cuz I forgot about it. And I really didn't put any effort into changing it everywhere. I went from page 1. In fact, in my local area, there's about 4 of us that waffle from 1 to 4, and we're just all over 1 to 4, 1 to 4, 1 to 4, whoever happens to be number 1 that day. It's been like that for years now. I was at page 3 and down. I'm like, what is going on? And then I did some research into it, figured it out using some tools that Google provides, found out, hmm, I confused Google because an LLC and an incorporation are two different businesses, even though in my mind it's just my business name. Who cares? Google cared. That's who cared. And because they were now confused, I had changed it on my website. I didn't change it on my website schema. That was a huge one. I changed it, or I tried to change it in my Google Business Profile, and they just kept rejecting it and putting it back. Why? Who knows? So I ended up going to BrightLocal and using their citation service so that it changed it all from behind the scenes. And they actually have this new thing. It's cool where you can sync with your Google profile and it syncs with Bing, Google, Facebook, and Google Analytics. Not sure why on that one. And Apple Maps. And what it does is you tell it the information. It goes behind the scenes with its little bots and goes up to the other one and it syncs the information. So that was the only way I could get my Google Business Profile changed without having to verify my business again, which I thought was cool as that as well. I figured that would be a delay. So I've got done all of that. And went in. I spent a weekend, probably actually 3 days, a Friday, Saturday, and a Sunday, looking for every place that I was online that I had made these random places over the years where I made an account. I had to figure out usernames, passwords. I mean, took me hours and hours, 3 days as a matter of fact, to get those all located, figured out how to log in. And changed. Um, so killed the whole weekend with that, and now I'm back on page 1. I'm not the first spot anymore. I'm still working on that, but it was a big deal. So if you are changing your phone number, if you're moving your office, changing your address, if you change your name, if you get married and change your last name, for ladies out there, you might want to consider that one. All of these things, even changing your email address— oh, I want to use this one instead— don't do it. If you can avoid it, don't do it. If you have to do it, then make the changes online all at once. Like I said, it took me 3 days. Okay, that's more all at once than when it— in my mind it was no big deal and I just did a partial change and thought I could just do this over the next 6 months. Don't do that. Take it from me, don't do that. If you want more tips like these, if you want to just know all the mistakes I've made that you can learn from and not make yourself, then just go ahead and subscribe and follow. Thank you.
