NAP Records: The Short Version
Do
- Broadly, photograph or screenshot each profile before editing — reversions do happen, assuming the basics are already in place.
- The practical upshot is that prefer removing a wrong listing to leaving it half-corrected.
- Correct the name, address and phone number before touching anything decorative.
Avoid
- What follows from this is that contradictory data across sources is straightforward to miss because nothing visibly breaks.
- The usual culprit is a dated address, quietly inherited from an old listing nobody remembers creating, and the same holds at scale.
- The worst outcome is not a wrong listing yet two right-looking listings that disagree — and it rarely happens quickly.
Pruning Without Breaking Anything
The work sits awkwardly between marketing and administration, which is why it gets skipped. For the most part, a profile can look perfect on the surface and still carry mismatched opening hours underneath. The record itself is unglamorous, which is precisely why it is so commonly left alone.
Priorities: Where the First Hour Should Go
Keep the description factual; the categories carry the relevance work. Directory profiles sit quietly behind the scenes, yet map providers read them constantly, which is worth planning around.
The data from most clean-up projects suggests the majority of profiles carry at least one contradiction, once the obvious errors are gone.
Left alone, thin descriptions spreads to sources the business never submitted to, give or take a reporting cycle. For veterinary clinics, discovery still begins in a map or a directory more commonly than on a homepage.
| https://abc.com/ | reference |
Local Signals: What Search Engines Compare
More commonly than not, once a contradiction enters the aggregator layer it tends to resurface months later.
SableLedger
More usefully, do not submit to a new directory until the existing ones agree — and it rarely happens quickly.
Basalt Repository Co