The verdict
The footer and the contact page are the two most-read blocks on a local site and almost nobody has ever compared them character by character. They were written at different times by different people, so they disagree about the suite number, the phone line, or the opening hours, and the disagreement has been published on every page for years.
Two blocks of text. One appears on every page of the site. The other appears on the page people go to when they have decided to get in touch. Between them they carry the whole of your contact information, and they were written eighteen months apart.
Put them side by side and read them as strings rather than as information. That is the check.
Why these two drift
The footer goes in at build time. Whoever set up the theme typed the address into a widget, and from then on it is one of those things that is technically editable and practically never touched, because editing it means finding which of four places in the theme settings controls it.
The contact page gets written later, usually by somebody at the practice rather than by the developer, with more care and more detail. Parking instructions. Which door. The second phone number for the other thing.
Then the practice changes something. A new line, a suite renumbering, a different set of hours on a Saturday. The person who makes the change updates the page they can find. That is the contact page, because they can navigate to it. The footer stays as it was.
What I find, in rough order of frequency
The common disagreements
- The suite or unit number is in one and not the other. The single most common finding, and it is the detail a delivery driver and a parser both need.
- Different phone numbers. Usually a tracking number on one and the real line on the other, or an old line that still forwards so nobody noticed.
- Hours that do not match. Often because the footer lists a simplified version and the contact page lists the real one, including the lunch closure.
- A different business name format. With and without the legal suffix, or with and without the practitioner’s name attached.
- Two email addresses. A generic one in the footer and a personal one on the contact page, or the reverse.
Why it is worth an hour
Google’s guidelines for representing a business are about the profile describing the business as it actually is, using the details the business actually uses. When your own site publishes two answers, there is no single set of details for anything else to match against.
And the practical cost lands before any of that. Somebody drives to a building and cannot find the suite. Somebody rings a number nobody answers any more. Those are not ranking problems, they are lost patients, and they happen on the two blocks of text most likely to be read by someone who has already decided to come.
The version that should win
Usually the contact page, because it was written by somebody who knew the details. But do not assume: ask the practice which is current, because occasionally the contact page is the one carrying a number that was retired and forwarded.
Then make the footer match it exactly. Same order, same abbreviations, same punctuation. Not because a small formatting difference is harmful on its own, but because once the two are identical, the next person who changes one will notice the other.
Then do the other two
The location pages and the structured data are the other half of this, and the markup is the one where formatting genuinely matters because a parser reads it rather than a person. Schema.org splits an address into named parts for exactly that reason: PostalAddress, the mailing address, with separate properties for the street address, the locality, the region and the postal code, which means a suite number sitting in the wrong field is a different fact rather than a formatting quirk. Your NAP is in four places and they disagree has the full check and the order to fix them in.
Complete and current business information is one of the things Google names as helping local ranking, alongside verification and reviews. Two contradicting versions on your own domain is the cheapest thing on that list to fix and the one nobody looks at.
The short version
- Two blocks, written eighteen months apart, and never compared.
- The footer is hard to edit, so it is the one that goes stale.
- Missing suite number is the most common finding. Then phone numbers, then hours.
- Read them as strings, side by side. Not as information.
- The contact page usually wins, but ask rather than assume.
- Make them identical, not just equivalent. Then the next change gets noticed.
- The cost lands before ranking. Somebody cannot find the suite or rings a dead line.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the four versions get stacked up and compared.
