Business Address Change Impact to Local SEO

I Changed My Business Address, Why are my Local Rankings Falling?

If your business address is changing, read on to learn about how to ensure your Google local pack rankings don’t plummet.

Moved to a New Address?
Things You Need to Know for Local SEO Rankings.

If you are a business owner or representing a business and don’t know what NAP means, you need the help of Webolutions’ SEO experts.

What is NAP?  Why is it important?

NAP stands for Name Address Phone.  It is important to have a consistent NAP because it helps a website to rank higher in local pack results.  An inconsistent NAP sends mixed signals to search engines like Google and BING, which results in some confusion and potentially lower Google search engine rankings.

If you don’t know what a “local pack” is, you should.
Here is an article to help you better understand what is the local pack.

What to Do if You Change Your Physical Address

A drop in local pack rankings, or at best a temporary fluctuation, can result when a business changes their physical address.  The ability to recover from an address change can be expedited with proper local SEO. You may wish to seek professional local SEO services from Webolutions to help recover from a drop-in rankings related to a change of address.

While local pack rankings in Google are impacted by several factors, the most important element for ranking well in Google’s local results is to have a consistent name, address and phone (NAP).  One’s NAP must be updated across the internet.  This can be a challenging and frustrating process, particularly if a company has hundreds of local citations.

What is a local citation?

A local citation is simply a listing found elsewhere on the internet referencing your company’s name, address and phone.  It may contain additional information like website address, company description, number of employees, revenue of company, etc.

Steps to Recover from an Address Change

Step 1. Identify all Local Citations Referencing your Company

This sounds simple, however, unless you’ve done this before, it can be quite overwhelming.  There are so many different places that may list your business, finding all of them can be difficult.

So, how does one achieve a listing of all local citations?  Your best bet is to hire an SEO company like Webolutions to take care of this for you, including all of the address updates across all of the business citations.

If you are adventurous and would like to find your business citations, there are a few services and/or tools that will help.  Among the most popular citation tools are:

• BrightLocal
• MOZ
• WhiteSpark

If you want to know what your top competitors are doing to rank so well,
this tool will help you.

(please note the above link will take you to the spyfu website)

Step 2. Prioritize Address Updates for Your Citations

All business citations are not created equal.  Some of your citations have greater “value” than others. When updating to a new address, you will want to start with the most important websites. These websites typically have greater authority and trust and, therefore, pass along more value to your website’s rankings.

Top 50 Local Citations in America (Ranked by Domain Authority = DA)

To help you prioritize, we provide you the most important citations, listed in descending order of importance.

Step 3. Update Citations to the New Business Address

The final step is to update all existing citations from the old address to the new location.  When done manually, this can be a very time consuming process, especially if there are hundreds of local citations.  Additionally, understanding how to navigate each citation website and enter the required information can be confusing and frustrating.

If you would like help updating your local citations, Webolutions can do this for you. Give us a call: 303-300-2640  

Learn more about the different types of SEO services.