Most advice on this topic is one sentence long: keep your name, address and phone number consistent everywhere.
Nobody disagrees with it and almost nobody can act on it, because it doesn’t say where “everywhere” is, what “consistent” means, or how you’d know if you’d failed. I’ve had clients tell me their details were consistent while their own contact page was linking to another company’s Google listing.
So this is the procedure instead. It takes about twenty minutes and I run it on every local site before I look at anything else.
What you’re actually proving
Google is trying to answer one question about you: which real-world business is this?
It has your website, your Business Profile, your social accounts, whatever directories have scraped you, and any citation your last agency built. From that pile it has to decide that all of it describes one entity, and if the pile contains contradictions, it resolves them without asking you.
“NAP consistency” is a shorthand for that. But the failures I actually find are rarely a mistyped suite number. They’re a site that describes a different business in one or two places and nobody noticed, usually because the site was adapted from somebody else’s build and the details came along with it. I’ve written about the worst version of that elsewhere.
So run the check as an identity check, not a spelling check.
The twenty-minute procedure
Open your Business Profile in one tab. That’s the reference copy. Not your letterhead, not what’s in your head. Whatever is on the profile is what Google already believes, and your job is to make everything else agree with it.
Then work through these.
1. The footer, on a page you didn’t build recently.
Not the home page. Pick an interior page: a service page, a blog post. Footers get edited on the home page and forgotten elsewhere on badly built themes.
Check the business name character for character, the street address, and the phone number. Then click the address. On most sites it’s a link, and on more sites than you’d expect it goes somewhere wrong.
2. The contact page, as a separate check.
The contact page usually predates the current footer and was written by a different person. Treat it as an independent source. Same three fields, same click-the-link test, plus the map embed. Open it and confirm the pin is your building and the label is your name.
Take map embeds from your own Business Profile listing, using the Share → Embed option on the listing itself. If you get the embed by typing the address into Maps, you can silently pick up the unit next door or a previous tenant.
- 3. Every social icon in the header and footer.
Click each one. All of them. This is the single highest-yield thirty seconds in the whole procedure and nobody does it, because the icons look right and clicking your own social links feels pointless. - 4. Your schema, against your visible page.
If you have LocalBusiness markup, read it and compare it field by field with what a visitor sees. Name, address, phone, hours, URL. Markup that contradicts the page is worse than no markup, and markup describing hours you don’t publish anywhere is a rich results violation. - 5. The name itself: is it one name?
Businesses accumulate variants: a legal name, a trading name, a name with the town in it, a name with “Ltd” or “LLC” sometimes. Pick the one on your Business Profile and use exactly that everywhere. Not a version of it. - 6. Hours in three places.
Profile, website, and any booking system embed. Booking widgets are the usual offender because they’re configured once and never revisited. - 7. Then, and only then, the directories.
This is last on purpose. Citation cleanup is what most local SEO sells, and it’s the least of it. If your own site contradicts your own profile, no amount of directory tidying resolves the ambiguity. You’re paying somebody to correct third parties while the primary source is still wrong.
What “consistent” actually means
Stricter than people assume in one place, looser in another.
Strict on the name. “Riverside Chiropractic” and “Riverside Chiropractic Clinic” are two strings. Pick one.
Strict on the phone number. One number, in one format. Not a tracking number on the site and the real number on the profile. That’s a common and genuinely damaging mismatch, and if you need call tracking, use a solution that swaps the number dynamically while leaving the canonical one in the markup.
Reasonable on the address. “Street” versus “St” is not what’s costing you. Google normalises that. A different unit number is a different address.
Strict on entity links. Every link that claims to be you, whether maps, social or booking, must actually be you. This is the one where I find real failures, and it’s binary. It either points at your business or it doesn’t.
What this doesn’t do
I’d rather set the expectation properly.
Getting this right will not lift you up the map pack. It’s a hygiene floor, not a lever. Proximity, review volume, category and the general strength of the site do far more for local visibility than consistent formatting ever will.
What it does is remove a reason for Google to be uncertain about you, and remove a way for a customer to end up at a competitor’s listing from your own contact page. On the three clinic sites I looked at this year, that second thing was not hypothetical.
It’s the check I run first because it’s cheap, it’s binary, and when it’s wrong it’s badly wrong.
The short version
- Your Business Profile is the reference copy. Everything else agrees with it, not the other way round.
- Click every address link and every social icon. Thirty seconds, highest yield in the procedure.
- Take map embeds from your own listing, not by searching the address.
- Check the contact page separately from the footer: different age, different author.
- Compare schema against the visible page, field by field.
- One name, one phone number, exactly. Street/St doesn’t matter; a different unit number does.
- Directories last. Fix your own site before paying anyone to fix other people’s.
- This is a floor, not a lever. It removes doubt. It doesn’t create visibility.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO is where most of this sits. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
