Why "NAP" is worth learning as a term
Name, Address, Phone — three fields that should be effortless to keep the same everywhere, and are exactly the fields that drift over time. A business moves offices and updates its website but not its Yelp listing. A phone system changes and three directories still show the old number. Each drift is small; the accumulated pattern is what damages trust.
Where citations actually come from
- General directories — Yelp, Yellow Pages, Bing Places, and country-equivalent platforms.
- Industry-specific directories — a dental association listing, a trade body directory, a niche review platform.
- Data aggregators — services that feed business data to many downstream directories at once, which is why a single wrong update can propagate widely.
Before building new citations, audit the ones you already have. We regularly find clients whose biggest citation problem isn't a lack of listings — it's three years of accumulated inconsistency across the listings they already have.
A simple audit you can run yourself
Search your business name plus "phone number" or "address" and check the first two pages of results. Note every directory that shows your details, and check each one against your current, correct information. It's tedious, but it's the exact process professional citation audits automate and scale.