Andrew Shotland and his team of wonks at Local SEO Guide had always felt that naming consistency was an important ranking factor for local directory sites.

So they designed a study to find out if Name Consistency Theory was for real. Apparently, it is. And this discovery presents an opportunity for directories to improve their ranking.

“We have worked on probably more local directory sites than any agency on the planet. There has always been a theme in Local SEO that NAP [name, address, phone] consistency matters for local businesses to rank well in the Local Packs,” Shotland said.

Does the same principle apply to local directories? To find out, the Local SEO Guide team looked at three different directories to determine how important naming consistency really was. One was a healthcare aggregator site. The others were a national multi-location brand in the local services sector and a Yellow Pages site.

“In each case, we compared the NAP on thousands of listings on these sites to what Google displayed in the Google Business Profile Knowledge Graph. The card on the right-hand side of a typical brand search result for a local business,” Shotland explained.

Local SEO Guide found 8,851 opportunities where the listing didn’t match what was on the Google Knowledge Panel. And this was just on the first directory it examined.

“For each site, the degree to which a listing matched the info in the Knowledge Graph correlated with Google rankings. So, a listing that was significantly different on the directory site tended not to rank well. A listing on that was an exact match on the directory site tended to rank well.”

Sifting Through 500,000 Listings

The immediate implication for directory sites is that they might improve their performance in Google by cleaning up their data.

The bigger implication, Shotland says, is that this same pattern is likely to be present for all sorts of queries. And not just business searches.

Local SEO’s VP SEO Strategy Karl Kleinschmidt sifted through 500,000 listings to try to either validate or refute their initial hypothesis that a portion of the directory’s search volume comes from people looking for the businesses in their directory via Google Search. And as noted, directory listing information that matches what Google has as the business’s information will lead to a higher ranking when someone searches for that business.

Shotland said there’s a 23.8% change in ranking position from when a listing in a directory doesn’t match the same NAP info as what’s on the Google Business Profile to when it’s a complete match.

Shotland and Kleinschmidt will share more specifics in a talk on LinkedIn tomorrow at 1 pm Eastern Time. You can sign up for the talk here.