NAPU – Your Business’ Online Fingerprint

In order for search engines to compare businesses and determine which deserve to rank highest for each search, they have to have a reliable way to identify when and where each business is referenced on the internet. It’s easy for them to identify your website by its URL (domain name), but how can they tell when your business is mentioned on a website if the URL is not present?

Your business’ name is only somewhat reliable, because different business units can all share the same name. Your business’ address is a little more reliable, but not entirely; because there is always the possibility that some other business has resided there in the past. Your business’ phone number is even more reliable, but still not perfect. For these reasons, search engines have to consider a combination of these identifiers in order to identify your business. In the world of local SEO (search engine optimization), a business’ identity is commonly referred to as its NAP (name, address, and phone number). We refer to it as a businesses NAPU (name, address, phone, and URL).

Why You Should Avoid Changing Your NAPU Like The Plague

One very critical component of a successful local SEO strategy is to ensure that, when your business is mentioned on the internet, it is always mentioned accurately and consistently. Search engines like to see that your business is mentioned on the internet, but they simply can’t attribute a mention to your business if it’s not clear that it is in fact your business that is being mentioned. In addition, search engines penalize businesses that seem to have multiple personalities or identities on the internet. Simply put, search engines reward businesses for having a predictable and consistent identity, and in some ways, customers in the real world do too.

This reality expresses itself perhaps most painfully when a business that has a large number of positive reviews on its Google Plus Local page moves to a new location. The policy of Google is that once your business moves, it is an entirely different “business”. They require that your old Google Plus Local page is marked as “closed”, and all of your customer reviews are stuck with it. You have to create a new Google Plus Local page and begin from scratch acquiring customer reviews.

When a business with an established internet presence changes its name, address, phone number, or URL, it has changed its identity or fingerprint. Search engines can’t attribute the same relevance to it, because they know nothing about it. They only know a lot about the old it… Changing a businesses identity online almost always is accompanied with a reduction in rankings and exposure. In some cases, recovery is fairly speedy, and in others it is long, painful, and drawn out. For this reason, from an SEO perspective, we encourage our clients to change a part of their identity only when it is absolutely unavoidable.