NAP Consistency
Consistency of your Name, Address, and Phone number across all platforms.
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. NAP consistency means that these three pieces of information appear identically across every platform where your care home or agency is listed, including your website, Google Business Profile, Carehome.co.uk, Homecare.co.uk, the CQC register, Bing Places, Yell, and any other directory or citation source.
Google cross-references your NAP data across dozens of sources to verify your location and identity. Where these sources disagree, even in minor formatting differences such as 'St' versus 'Street', a missing area code, or a slightly different business name, Google's confidence in your location data falls and your Map Pack ranking is suppressed. The suppression is silent: there is no notification, no error, and no obvious cause to investigate unless you know what to look for.
The most common causes of NAP inconsistency in care homes are phone number changes that were updated on the website but omitted from directories, name format differences between the trading name and the registered company name, and address formatting variations that accumulated across years of manual profile creation. Most care homes we audit have between four and eight NAP mismatches across their main citation sources.
Fixing NAP inconsistency requires identifying every source where your business is listed, standardising the name, address, and phone number to a single agreed format, and updating each source systematically. The work avoids technical complexity, but it is methodical and time-consuming. The ranking benefit appears gradually over four to eight weeks as Google processes the updated information from each source.