NAP error statistics

[JesseLinklater]

Can anyone point me to a good, reliable stat for the average percentage of NAP errors for a local business?

 

[Nyagoslav]

There was an interesting infographic released quite some time ago by Yext on this topic:

Yext Infographic: 64% of Foursquare Listings Have Missing or Incorrect Info | Street Fight

I think the numbers are very low there, though, because Yext used their diagnostic tool to produce the stats. However, their tool checks for only one listing per site, i.e. duplicate listings are not taken into account. Additionally, their tool doesn't always find listings that actually exist, especially if the information on such listings is too inconsistent. Thus, I would probably add at least 20-30% to the stats they reported.

One notable example of why the research is quite flawed is their reporting of MerchantCircle featuring just 40% "of anything wrong". MerchantCircle is the site on which I consistently find the largest number of duplicate listings, but as I mentioned above duplicates are not taken into account in that research because of the downsides of the tool they have used to gather the data.

There are a couple of other similar researches:

Yellow Pages Sites Beat Google In Local Data Accuracy Test

Yelp Product & Engineering Blog | Data Quality: How Yelp stacks up to the competition

However, both of them didn't take into account an important feature such as historical changes in core business details (for example: a business moved to a new address some time in the past), and that is why they are both quite flawed. Specifically the Yelp research is very questionable as the results are quite self-serving.

I hope this helps!

Cheers,
Nyagoslav

 

[Colan Nielsen]

This article has a great study you might find useful too - http://searchengineland.com/the-most-common-problems-with-local-business-listings-151247

 

[JesseLinklater]

Thanks Nyagoslav and Colan. I really appreciate your help. That gives me a lot to work with.

Cheers,

Jesse