On a med spa audit, the address in the footer belonged to a different company. So did the address on the contact page. So did the Instagram icon in the header.
Three separate places on the site, all pointing at a business that was not the client. Nobody in the business had noticed, because nobody reads their own footer.
The cause was mundane. The site had been adapted from an existing build, a common enough thing to do, and the previous business’s details came along with it. Someone changed the visible copy and nobody went through the furniture.
Why this is worse than it looks
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 over the years, and any citation your last agency built. From that pile it has to decide that all of it describes one entity. When the pile contains contradictions, it resolves them without asking you, and you do not get told what it decided.
A wrong suite number is a small contradiction. A footer, a contact page and a social link all describing a different company is not a NAP inconsistency. It is the site arguing that you are somebody else.
That is why I run this as an identity check rather than a spelling check, and why the whole procedure starts with the question of who the site says you are.
Google names three things that decide local ranking, relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence is the one an identity split damages directly. Reviews, mentions and links accumulating against two half-brands rather than one whole business means neither reaches the threshold. The same page notes there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking”, so there is no route round it either.
The legitimate version of two identities
Now the more interesting case, because it is not always a mistake.
Plenty of businesses genuinely operate as two things at one address. A chiropractic clinic with a med spa in the same building. A dental practice with a separate cosmetic brand. A garage that also sells cars. The owner is one person, the lease is one lease, and the two offerings have different customers, different price points and often different names.
The question is whether that is one entity or two, and the honest answer is: it depends on whether they are genuinely separable, and you have to pick one and commit.
Treat it as one business when the services are bought by the same people in the same visit, when the staff overlap, and when there is one phone number. One profile, one site, one identity, with the second offering as a service rather than a brand. This is the right answer more often than owners expect, because two thin identities beat neither.
Treat it as two when they have separate entrances, separate phone numbers, separate staff and separate reception. Google’s own guidance on distinct businesses at a shared address turns on exactly that kind of separation. Then you need two profiles, and realistically two sites, and twice the work. Do not do this because the second brand sounds good. Do it because the businesses are actually different.
What half-committing looks like
This is the failure mode I actually find, and it is worse than either choice.
One website with two logos. A profile in one name and a footer in the other. A booking system branded for the second business embedded in a page belonging to the first. Reviews split across two profiles so neither has enough. Two Instagram accounts, one dormant.
The result is that neither identity accumulates prominence, and Google has to guess which one the address belongs to. Whichever it picks, half your signals are attached to the other one.
Reviews are where that hurts most, because they are the signal customers actually read. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses and 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 or higher. Two profiles with nine reviews each present very differently from one with eighteen, and the split is invisible to the customer deciding against you.
The twenty-minute check
- Open the footer and read it as a stranger. Name, address, phone. Does it describe the business the rest of the page describes?
- Open the contact page. Same test. These two disagree surprisingly often, because they were built at different times.
- Click every social icon. Not look at. Click. This is where the med spa’s was wrong, and an icon is the last thing anybody audits.
- Search your own phone number. See whose name comes back.
- Check the embedded map. Is it your profile, a plain map, or someone else’s pin?
- Then decide, in writing, whether you are one business or two, and make every one of the above agree with that decision.
The short version
- A footer, contact page and social icon pointing at another company is not a NAP error. It is the site saying you are somebody else.
- It usually comes from a site adapted from an existing build and nobody auditing the furniture.
- Two identities at one address can be legitimate, but you must pick one model and commit.
- One business when customers, staff and phone are shared. Two only with separate entrances, phones and staff.
- Half-committing is the worst outcome. Neither identity accumulates anything.
- Click the social icons. Nobody ever does.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO covers the profile, the citations and the entity. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
