NAP consistency: why your contact details must match everywhere
NAP is name, address, phone. Broadened, it also covers email, website, social profiles, opening hours and service area. If those details differ between the site, maps and directories, a search engine can't tell which are correct — and lowers its trust in all of them.
For AI systems it matters even more: they cross-check facts against several sources, and a contradiction means the business simply doesn't get mentioned in the answer.
A single source of truth
A practical arrangement: contact details live in one place, and the site footer, the contacts page and the structured data all read from there rather than duplicating them by hand. Any change starts at that source and spreads out to the platforms from there.
Keep the registered address and the address clients actually visit as separate fields — they're different things and shouldn't be conflated.
Where to look for discrepancies
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The site itself: homepage, footer, contacts page, Schema.org.
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Maps and directories.
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Social networks and messengers.
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Proposals, PDFs, job ads, old press releases.
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Duplicate listings left over from moves and phone number changes.
The order to fix them in
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Your own site first — it's the primary source for everything else.
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Then the large platforms with real traffic.
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Record the link, date and moderation status for every edit.
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Don't create a new listing if the old one can be edited — duplicates do more harm than outdated details.
How to maintain it
Check the key platforms monthly and the full list quarterly. Measure not the number of mentions but the share of platforms with details confirmed correct. Each platform needs an owner and a way to recover access, otherwise in a year you'll find nobody can edit the listing.
If contact details have drifted apart across platforms and it's unclear what's where, we can help build the register and bring everything into line.