NAP (Name, Address, Phone)

NAP stands for name, address and phone number: the three facts that let a machine place your business somewhere specific in the world. The term comes from local search, where these details have been the backbone of being found for as long as there have been online directories.

Two properties matter, and they are different properties. The first is presence: the three facts must appear as ordinary readable text somewhere on your site, not only inside an image, a logo, a PDF or a contact form. The second is consistency: they must be written the same way everywhere they appear — your site, your listings, your social profiles, your invoices.

Consistency is the part people underestimate. A machine encountering Baslerstrasse 12 in one place and Baslerstr. 12a in another has to decide whether these are one business or two, and the safe answer is often to trust neither. The same goes for a name appearing with and without its legal suffix, or a telephone number written three different ways.

The failure is common and quiet. A great many good local sites never state their city in plain text anywhere — it lives inside a map embed, or a footer image, or is simply assumed because everybody local already knows. For most local trades, nearly every question a customer puts to an assistant contains a place. A site that never names its own place cannot be matched to any of them.

The human translation is a shop sign. You know where your shop is, and so does everyone who has been. The sign is not for them. It is for the person who has never been, standing at the end of the street, deciding whether this is the place.