Local SEO (NAP) · Playbook
Local SEO thresholds — the rules Local SEO (NAP) grades on, and where they come from
Issue #70: the reader-facing side of the source field each finding carries, so “why is that a
warning?” has a checkable answer.
Local SEO differs from the rest of the lane in one useful way: most of these are presence checks, not tuned numbers. There is no band to argue about in “the page has a phone number” — either a prospect can call you or they cannot. The one graded comparison, NAP consistency, is the strictest rule nosepass has, and it is the only one that fails a page.
What fails the page
| Check | Rule | Level |
|---|---|---|
| NAP inconsistency | the phone in LocalBusiness schema ≠ the phone visible on the page |
error |
Why this alone is an error. Every other finding is something missing, which costs you ranking. This one is something wrong: two different phone numbers for the same business is the signal aggregators and Google use to decide which listing to trust, and a mismatch actively degrades an existing profile. It is also the one a human is least likely to notice, because both numbers look fine in isolation.
Comparison is on normalised digits — country code and formatting stripped, last 10 digits compared —
so (312) 555-0143, +1 312-555-0143 and 3125550143 are the same number, not three findings.
What flags for review
| Check | Rule | Level |
|---|---|---|
No LocalBusiness schema |
absent | warn |
| Incomplete schema NAP | name, address or telephone missing from the schema |
warn |
| No phone on the page | no tel: link, no schema telephone, no visible number |
warn |
| No street address | absent from both schema and visible copy | warn |
Google Business Profile readiness (advisory)
| Check | Rule | Level |
|---|---|---|
| No opening hours | schema has no openingHours / openingHoursSpecification |
info |
| No geo coordinates | schema has no geo latitude/longitude |
info |
| No embedded map | no Google Maps embed on the page | info |
These stay info deliberately. They strengthen a location signal but their absence is not a defect —
plenty of well-ranking local pages carry none of them, and a business with irregular hours is often
right not to publish a schedule it cannot keep.
Caveats worth stating to a client
- A service-area business legitimately hides its address. A mobile practice or a home-based
business may deliberately omit a street address; the
warnis correct as a prompt to check, not as a fault to fix. - Multi-location sites need the site-wide mode. A single page’s NAP being internally consistent
says nothing about whether location pages agree with each other, which is where real inconsistency
usually lives. The planned multi-location NAP matrix (
locations.csv) is the answer to that. - These rules assume one business per page. A directory listing several practices will trip the consistency check by design.