How Important is NAP Consistency Still?

[Marissa]

I am using a separate tracking phone number for my website and for my GMB. When creating other citations like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Bing - should I just create a separate tracking number for those as well?

Each place that our phone number is listed will not be consistent, so can that hurt our SEO efforts?

Thank you,
Marissa

 

[Colan Nielsen]

From an organizational standpoint and from a value standpoint I wouldn't bother using tracking numbers on all the different directories. Unless you have a good use case to do so.

With that said it likely wouldn't cause any nap issues. As long as Google has already built a knowledge panel for the business then it understands what it is as an entity and a couple odd phone numbers can't break that.

If you wanted to be extra cautious you could add the tracking numbers you use on things like Yelp to the additional phone number section inside GMB.

 

[whitespark]

I agree with Colan. I don't think there is much benefit to putting a tracking number on all your listings. It would cost quite a bit in call tracking fees to make a number for each site, and the data you get back will basically be "no one is calling from this directory".

I have seen people put a call tracking number on a few sites that they're paying for ads on (Yelp, Avvo, Lawyers.com), and it was a valuable and important move for them to get a sense of whether or not they were getting a return on that spend. As Colan indicated, a few different phone numbers aren't going to hurt your rankings.

That said, there is still a case for citation cleanup when things are really all over the place. We have seen positive results from our cleanup work time and time again. We're working on some case studies we'll be publishing soon.

 

[Marissa]

@Colan Nielsen @whitespark Thank you!

 

[Josh Vinecombe]

I agree with Colan. I don't think there is much benefit to putting a tracking number on all your listings. It would cost quite a bit in call tracking fees to make a number for each site, and the data you get back will basically be "no one is calling from this directory".

I have seen people put a call tracking number on a few sites that they're paying for ads on (Yelp, Avvo, Lawyers.com), and it was a valuable and important move for them to get a sense of whether or not they were getting a return on that spend. As Colan indicated, a few different phone numbers aren't going to hurt your rankings.

That said, there is still a case for citation cleanup when things are really all over the place. We have seen positive results from our cleanup work time and time again. We're working on some case studies we'll be publishing soon.

How's FC Developments Custom Home Builder going? If these case studies coming up are anything like that, I can't wait!