Running a NAP consistency audit for a local business

A NAP consistency audit is one of the least glamorous checks you can run on a local business, and one of the easiest to skip, which is exactly why it is worth doing properly. NAP stands for name, address and phone number, the three details that should read identically wherever a business appears online. In practice they rarely do. A plumber might trade as “Dave's Plumbing” on their van, “David Smith Plumbing Services Ltd” on Companies House, and “Dave Smith Plumbing” on an old Yell listing, with a mobile number on the website and a landline that stopped ringing years ago on Google. None of that looks dramatic on its own. Together, it is the kind of quiet mess a proper audit exists to find.

Why the mismatches matter

The customer-facing cost is the easier one to picture. Someone finds an old directory listing, rings the number on it, and gets a disconnected line or a different business entirely, and most people do not go looking for the right number after that, they just try the next result. The less visible cost is what inconsistent listings do to how Google and other directories treat the business. Search engines cross-reference the same business across multiple sources to decide how much to trust a listing, and a name, address or phone number that does not match across those sources is a weak signal even when every individual listing is genuine. Neither of these problems announces itself. A business owner sees a website that looks fine and a Google Business Profile that shows up in search, and has no reason to suspect the citations feeding into that trust are quietly contradicting each other.

Where inconsistencies actually creep in

Business details drift for ordinary reasons: a business moves premises and updates its website but not the directory listing it set up five years earlier, a sole trader upgrades to a limited company and the new legal name never makes it onto Facebook, a phone number changes when a provider switches over and the old one is never removed from a listing nobody remembers creating. Suite numbers and abbreviations cause a surprising amount of the damage too. “Unit 4” on one listing and “4” on another is a minor formatting difference to a person, but it is a mismatch to anything checking for an exact match. The usual places worth checking are the website footer and contact page, the Google Business Profile, Facebook and Instagram bios, Bing Places, and any trade-specific or local directory the business appears on, Yell, Thomson Local, or a sector directory for their trade.

How to run the audit

Start from the version of the name, address and phone number on the business's own website, since that is the version the owner is most likely to recognise as correct, then search the business name plus town and work through what comes back. Note every listing that surfaces, screenshot or copy the NAP details from each, and put them side by side. Differences that matter are the ones a person would actually notice if they compared them: a different phone number, a different building name or number, a trading name that has genuinely changed. Differences that do not matter much on their own, “St” versus “Street”, are worth normalising for tidiness but are not usually what is costing calls or trust. Companies House is worth a look too, not because a registered address always has to match a trading address, plenty of businesses legitimately differ there, but because a registered address that has changed recently and a website that still lists the old one is a genuine sign the online details have gone stale, a pattern covered in more detail in what Companies House data tells you before you email a prospect.

What to fix first

Not every mismatch deserves the same urgency. A wrong or dead phone number is the one that costs enquiries immediately, so it comes first regardless of where it appears. After that, prioritise the listings that actually carry traffic: the Google Business Profile and the top two or three directories that show up when you search the business name, rather than every citation that has ever existed. Chasing down a listing on a directory that closed down years ago is a poor use of an afternoon. This is really the same discipline as the wider audit habit covered in a website audit checklist for local business sites: check the things that affect real customers before the things that only affect a spreadsheet, and treat stale contact details as part of the same problem as any other out of date information sitting on a website.

Keeping it as a pitch, not just a checklist

A NAP audit is also a useful, low-pressure way into a conversation with a prospect, because it is specific and easy to prove rather than a general claim about their marketing. “Your Google listing shows a number that goes to voicemail” is concrete in a way that most cold outreach is not, and it costs nothing for the business owner to verify themselves. When Patchscout audits a business as part of a search, it attaches the Companies House record alongside the crawl of the live site, so a registered address that has moved and a website contact page that has not are sitting next to each other rather than requiring two separate lookups. It will not chase down every directory listing for you, but it removes one of the manual steps before you get to the ones that do.

The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see what that Companies House and website comparison looks like against a trade and town you already know.