2018

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Why NAP Is Important To SEO

A major factor in determining how you rank locally is the quantity and quality of citations and NAP consistency across your citations.

What does NAP stand for?

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. It's a critical factor in local SEO and influences which companies Google and other search engines show for local intent searches.

People often refer to occurrences of NAP data around the web as citations. A citation is when your NAP data shows up on directory sites like Yelp or Angie's List, newspaper articles, blogs posts, etc.

Moz's Local Search Ranking Factors report is an industry standard survey that describes the importance of ranking factors for local SEO.

Out of the top 6 “Foundational Ranking Factors,” 3 are related to citation quantity, quality, and consistency. In other words, is the business name, address, phone number, and website consistent and accurate across all references of your NAP data online?

Out of the top 13 “Competitive Difference Makers,” 6 have to do with citation quantity, quality, and consistency.

How business data is distributed

There are data companies that collect, verify, and distribute business data for companies all around the world. When a business is started, its information eventually finds its way into this business data ecosystem.

Many of those providers make money by selling this data as leads or as a data feed to other companies.

InfoGroup is one such company and you can actually buy business leads directly from them.

Companies like Google, Yelp, and others subscribe to the business data from these data providers. Additionally, they scour the web for business data and add it to their databases.

The result of all this is a business data ecosystem, where websites and data providers are feeding off each other's information and that information gets spread around, both on and offline.

This business data ecosystem is why you get telemarketing calls, snail mail solicitations, etc, when you start a business. It's also why your business data can usually be found on sites like Yelp, Google+, and YellowPages.com even if nobody in your company created a listing on those sites.

Why are citations such an important ranking factor?
In lieu of having to manually review business information for millions of companies, Google uses data points it can process programmatically to determine your rankings.

When determining how you rank in local results, Google scans the web for mentions of your business name, address, phone number, website URL, and several other data points. It then compares that information to other data sources, including the major data providers and possibly even post office records, state business filings, and telephone records.

Your local search rankings are heavily influenced by whether or not Google finds your business information on the web and from their data suppliers, and whether that information is consistent and matches that provided on your Google+ page and website.

Watch out for local SEO landing pages

There's a common practice amongst local SEO companies that don't really know what they're doing (or don't care) of creating local SEO mini sites with a tracking number attached, and then tying those sites to your Google+ page and building citations using the mini site URL and the tracking number instead of your real website URL and primary business landline.

local site SEO

They do this so they can track all calls / form submissions and report to their clients on how well they're doing. I get that.

But, quite frankly, these companies should be sued out of business. It's a HUGE problem, here's why…

Business data moves around the data ecosystem like a virus – once it's found in one location it multiplies and spreads.

If the information is accurate, then it's a good thing and you benefit, usually with improved rankings.

If the information is inaccurate, it still spreads, but it damages your ability to rank locally and becomes extremely difficult to clean up.

In practice, what happens when you put a tracking number or mini-site URL on your Google+ page or other citations is that all those other business directories, data providers, etc, find that information, save it, and spread it around like a virus to all the other business directories and data providers.

This dramatically impacts your ability to rank locally.

How to fix the problem

Fixing the problem isn't easy; the business data ecosystem is like a hierarchy, with the authoritative players at the top and everyone else below them. But all the players in the ecosystem "borrow" information from one another and so inaccurate information spreads fast.

Fixing the problem of inaccurate or inconsistent NAP data starts by fixing information on file with the authoritative players. That usually means the starting with the big data providers:

InfoGroup
Acxiom
Localeze
Factual

Then moving on to the authoritative directory sites:

Google+
Yelp
Yahoo
Bing
Etc…

And finally, cleaning up any remaining listings on the second and third tier directory sites like:

Yellowpages.com
CitySearch
Healthgrades.com
AngiesList
Etc…

…And the list goes on and on.

Fixing the problem is hard

Once you fix an incorrect listing, it's not uncommon for it to pop right back up again later because there is no one single authority for business data; that means if you correct a Yahoo listing, for example, Yahoo may see that listing still exists on Yelp and re-create it automatically. It's like whack-a-mole.

But the cleanup is necessary; if you don't fix at least a large chunk of the problem, it's unlikely you'll ever rank locally for anything but non-competitive keywords.

The good news is citation cleanup is totally doable It's certainly not easy, but it's also not impossible. It certainly takes longer to clean up than if there was never a problem in the first place, but it can be cleaned up and it can usually be done in a way that is not cost-prohibitive.

In the end, your online citations should match the business filings with the state, the information the post office has, the information on your website, and should ideally use a landline as the phone number.

Why NAP Is Important To SEO

answers - 03/16/2018

Digital Marketing Performance Strategy

These services help clients frame business goals and establish priorities to support the achievement of these goals and relevance at scale.

Mobile is the new battleground for brands, yet many marketers struggle to understand how digital marketing trends can influence growth. Google's VP of Marketing, Lisa Gevelber, spoke about how brands can elevate digital marketing performance in a mobile-first world.

With digital marketing, brands can more deeply understand their consumers, and as a result, provide them with more valuable experiences. But mobile also creates challenges for marketers as they try to understand its true impact.

Lisa Gevelber, Google: iCrossing has a long history of leadership in search engine marketing. How can search help marketers understand consumer purchasing behaviors?

At Debello, we believe search and social media are important indicators of intent. Looking at these signals, in combination with other digital behavior, we gain a deeper appreciation of what customers want and how they discover it. That gets us closer to understanding the nuances of the purchasing process overall.

Understanding context and timing is also really important. For example, when VMware tasked iCrossing with driving downloads for an app-based game to educate IT professionals. They developed a campaign using in-app interest targeting as well as Search Ads on Google Play. By putting this download into the right environments and calling out its gameplay element, the campaign drove an astonishing 11,200 downloads in the first six months. This approach allowed them to connect with the right consumers, in the right micro-moment, and provide something useful to them.

Geo-location targeting and remarketing can make a big impact as well. PetSmart was opening a series of new stores, and ran dynamic Search and Display ads targeted to a 10-15-mile radius of each location. This activity was run both in advance of the stores opening—utilizing retargeting—and during the openings, to provide a coupon that could be used in the new stores. This targeted audience approach, coupled with location data, drove over 4,000 engagements to these new PetSmart locations in a short five-week period.

We know that today's consumer journey is multi-channel and multi-device. How should marketers think about measurement in a mobile-first world?

Marketers need to reach a level of comfort with the fact that there's going to be a lot of estimates. You're going to have to bridge gaps between what's known and what you think is happening. We try to help marketers take that leap, to start thinking about these three questions:

"What is worth measuring?"
"How much can we proxy?"
"How much is as simple as tracking changes in monthly or annualized sales?"

If people don't let go of outdated metrics, they're going to miss out on connecting consumers with their brand, because we're not solving seamless cross-device measurement anytime soon. It's definitely more difficult for people who have been traditional performance marketers, who have built their entire careers on ROI, because the notion of brand performance and growth has changed.

But digital marketing performance has changed and specific tactics for performance no longer bind us. We have to think about performance from an omnichannel perspective; everything is performance marketing.

For example, now we see direct response-driven brands launch on YouTube, which has traditionally been an upper funnel tactic—educating people and emotionally connecting them with your brand. But guess what? You can now buy directly from a video, so you're combining brand work with a very bottom-of-the-funnel activity, and brands are getting great sales performance from it.

What are your tips for marketers who might be struggling with how performance has evolved?

First, think very hard about the customers you want to go after, but be open to those you don't know about yet—use the data that's available in the marketplace to figure that out.

Second, don't box yourself in by where we are with today's measurement solutions. Technology adoption is happening so fast that we're never going to be able to encapsulate everything and measure it perfectly. If you hold on too tight to legacy metrics, you're going to miss opportunities.

And that leads to the third thing: You need to test and experiment. Understand what you want to get out of a marketing campaign, base your KPIs on that, and think about what you're willing to risk to potentially be rewarded over time. That's a mindset that we've lost sight of, but in order to drive real performance growth you have to experiment and try new stuff that isn't guaranteed to work.

Digital Strategy - 03/09/2018