What is NAP data and What to do if Your Insurance Agency's Changes
What is NAP Data?
Your insurance agency's NAP data - name address and phone - is central to how customers and others locate and contact your agency. Today your NAP data also includes your website address, even though the W isn't part of the shorthand acronym.
There have always been multiple directories that include your NAP data, but two of these were so important, that as long as your business was accurately represented in them, almost all consumers could find your agency. I'm speaking of course, of the telephone white and yellow pages. Inaccurate information in either of these meant that potential clients couldn't contact you by phone or decide if your office was convenient to their business or residence location.
These directories are far less relevant today and technology innovation has caused the 'directory ecosystem' to both greatly expand and to become far more interconnected. Today there are literally hundreds of online directories, search engine profiles and review websites that include your agency and NAP data. As an example, Confluency's Rep Man service monitors over 300 of these.
While only a small fraction of these get any direct traffic*, the major local search engines, like Google, crawl the lesser directories to validate business data. MIssing profiles and discrepancies in NAP data between individual directory profiles reduce Google's 'confidence' in your business data and make it less likely that your agency will be represented at the top of local search results.
Why Does NAP Data Change?
There are several reasons why your NAP data might change, but here are the four most common:
- You move your insurance agency location:
Obviously the street address component of your NAP would be affected, but phone numbers can also change. - You change your agency name:
This is most common in a merger or acquisition scenario, but in some cases, a rebranding initiative might cause a NAP discrepancy. - You change your agency website address:
Some insurance agencies will acquire a more memorable or shorter domain name and change their website address. In other cases, a service provider may suggest a second website or a website with keywords in the domain (e.g., www.insuranceproviderrivercity.com). Both of these are almost always a bad idea. Why these domain changes are counterproductive is something we cover in another post, but these changes do happen. - One of the major data providers makes a change to your agency data:
There are several data providers, like Acxiom, that distribute your insurance agency NAP data downstream to the online directories, search engines. For the most part, these providers get their data by crawling public record databases like the DMVs or the USPS. They will make automated and human curated comparisons of this data and make judgements as to what your agency's correct NAP data is, and then the online directories download updated from them.
How to Control or Correct Your Insurance Agency's NAP Data
The lion's share - over 85% - of local search traffic goes through one of four platforms:
- Google My Business
- Bing Places for Business
- Yelp
- YP.com
You should claim and update, as necessary, each of these profiles for your agency; note: each location will have its own profile. There is no cost for doing this, though the claiming and updating process will be a little different for each platform and may require a verification step. Updates you make may not appear right away due to the review process each platform uses. In some cases your update may not appear in your business profile and you may have to try again.
Aside from the four big NAP profile platforms, there are literally hundreds of online directories featuring your insurance agency data. These lesser directories are not as important as the big four above, but they are none-the-less important due to the interconnectedness of the local search ecosystem. Claiming and updating your business profile with each of the data providers is a good idea, but it isn't cost effective to update each individual business profile individually and sometimes it isn't even possible. In many cases specialty and hyper-local directories are updated only indirectly, as through data feeds from one of the providers.
However the data providers, the aforementioned Acxiom as well as neustar/Localeze, factual and infogroup, all have their own procedures for claiming and updating your agency NAP data, and it isn't always easy. You should also be aware that, even after you update your agency information it can revert back since discrepancies may persist with the public record data sources. The data providers will continue to crawl these sources and if their algorithms believe a change back to their original, incorrect data is in order, they may do it. Because of that you will need to monitor these sources regularly or use a service to do it for you.
Finally...the Benefit and a Little Help
It may seem like a nuisance, monitoring and updating your business data across the internet. But the cost of doing so is nominal and local search optimization, of which normalized NAP data is a significant component, is one of the most cost effective ways to improve search visibility and capture more online leads. There are services that will aid you in your efforts, but there are significant differences between those services and their cost. A few questions you will want answered before selecting a service to help you correct your NAP data:
- Will the service make NAP corrections for me?
- Will the service continue to submit my data to the data providers so it does not revert to inaccurate data?
- What other benefits does the service deliver? For example,
- Monitoring and management of other local search optimization components like,
- social media activity
- review generation and responses
- Competitor and keyword analysis
Not every insurance agency will require the same level of service and getting answers to the above questions will help you select the best fit, get your NAP data fixed and get your agency on the path to more leads.