Local SEO
NAP Consistency Audit
The narrower, cheaper sibling of citation building. This one only diagnoses and corrects — it does not build new listings.
A NAP consistency audit finds every place your business name, address and phone number appear online, and identifies where they disagree. The Nexclick corrects them at source, including the aggregators that silently republish old details after you thought the problem was fixed.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You moved premises and are not confident the old address is gone everywhere.
- You changed phone number and calls are still going to the old one.
- Your business trades under a name that differs from the registered company name.
- Local rankings dropped after a move or rebrand and nothing else changed.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Establish the canonical record first
- One written definition of exactly how your name, address and phone are formatted — including whether "Limited" appears, whether a suite number is included, and how the postcode is spaced.
- Full discovery sweep
- Directories, aggregators, social profiles, review platforms, old supplier pages and press coverage. Discovery is deliberately wider than a citation tool’s default list.
- Variance scoring
- Every listing scored as exact match, minor variance or wrong. Minor variances matter more than people expect, because they create ambiguity about whether it is the same business.
- Aggregator correction
- The data sources that feed dozens of downstream directories. Fixing individual listings without fixing the aggregators means the old data returns within months.
- Duplicate and orphan detection
- Listings created by former staff, agencies or auto-generated from old data. Often the highest-impact finding and never visible from your own dashboard.
- Site and schema alignment
- Footer, contact page and LocalBusiness schema checked against the canonical record. Internal inconsistency undermines external cleanup.
- A correction log with evidence
- Every change recorded with the date and the source, so drift is provable later and nobody repeats work already done.
Comparison
Which inconsistencies actually matter
Not every variance is equal, and treating them as equal wastes budget on cosmetic differences. This is how The Nexclick prioritises, so you can spend on the ones that do harm.
| Variance | Severity | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Different phone number | Critical | Genuinely ambiguous entity, and you are losing calls right now |
| Old address still live | Critical | Points customers to the wrong place and confuses location signals |
| Duplicate listing for the same location | Critical | Splits signals and can suppress the legitimate listing |
| Completely different business name | Critical | Reads as a different entity entirely |
| "Ltd" present in some listings, absent in others | Moderate | Creates entity ambiguity at scale |
| Suite or unit number missing | Moderate | Matters in multi-occupancy buildings; less elsewhere |
| Trading name versus registered name | Moderate | Pick one and use it everywhere; consistency beats correctness here |
| "Street" versus "St" | Minor | Google normalises most abbreviations reliably |
| Postcode spacing or capitalisation | Minor | Normalised. Fix opportunistically, do not pay to chase it. |
| Different website URL (http vs https, www) | Minor | Redirects handle it, though tidy it where the listing is editable |
| Category described differently across directories | Minor | Directories use their own taxonomies; this is expected |
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Day 1–2
Define the canonical record
Agreed against Companies House and your Google Business Profile. Every later decision depends on this being fixed first.
- 02Week 1
Discover
Automated scanning plus manual searching for historic details — old addresses, previous phone numbers, former trading names.
- 03Week 2–6
Correct
Aggregators first, then individual directories. Some require postal or phone verification at the details currently listed, which is awkward when those are the wrong ones.
- 04Month 3
Re-scan
A verification sweep to catch anything that reverted. Directories re-import old data regularly, and this step is what makes the work stick.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- The canonical NAP record as a one-page document your whole team copies from.
- A full inventory spreadsheet: every listing found, its status, and access details where available.
- A correction log with dates, so drift is provable and work is never repeated.
- A duplicate register, including listings nobody in your business knew existed.
- A three-month verification re-scan included in the fee.
Tools and platforms
- BrightLocal or Whitespark
- Google Business Profile
- Manual search across historic details
- Companies House records
- Schema.org validator
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Discovery takes one week. Corrections take four to eight weeks, and the constraint is directory response times rather than effort — some verify by post, a few are genuinely unresponsive. The three-month re-scan matters more than it sounds, because aggregators re-import historic data on their own cycles and roughly one in ten corrections reverts. On results: this is hygiene rather than growth. Fixing inconsistency removes a handicap, it does not create an advantage, and anyone presenting a NAP audit as a route to ranking gains is overselling it.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
Fixed price including discovery, correction and the three-month re-scan. Cheaper than full citation building because no new listings are created.
Questions
NAP Consistency Audit questions
How is this different from citation building?
This audit only finds and fixes what already exists. Citation building also creates new listings on sources you are missing. Most businesses need this first — cleaning up wrong data delivers more than adding correct data on top of a mess, and it costs less.
How far back do old details persist?
Years, routinely. Directories rarely purge data and aggregators recycle it between one another. We regularly find addresses businesses left five or more years ago still live on sources that are still being crawled.
Should we use our registered name or our trading name?
Whichever customers actually search for, applied consistently everywhere. Consistency matters more than which one you pick. Where the two differ substantially, use the trading name publicly and make sure Companies House and your bank records make the relationship clear.
What if a directory will not respond?
A few are genuinely unresponsive, particularly abandoned ones. Where a listing sits on a site with no traffic and no crawl attention, the honest answer is that it does not matter enough to keep chasing. We will tell you that rather than billing repeated attempts.
Does this need repeating?
An annual re-scan is sensible, and a full audit is worth repeating after any move, rebrand, phone change or acquisition. Between those events, drift is slow. The re-scan at three months is included precisely because that is when most reversion happens.
We have never moved. Do we still need this?
Possibly not, and we will tell you on the first call. A single-location business that has never moved, never rebranded and never changed number usually has good consistency already. This service earns its cost where there is history to untangle.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.