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Your name, address, and phone number shouldn't be written two different ways

Get your listing, your website, and your social media to state your name, address, and phone number exactly the same way, down to the last comma.

By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026

Your Google Business Profile isn't the only place your name, address, and phone number show up, so it's worth checking whether they all say the same thing. Search for your business on Google the way a new customer would. Your profile says "123 Main St." Your website's footer says "123 Main Street, Suite 2B." And the receipt you send through WhatsApp says "Main St, Unit 3." To you, that's all the same address. Google doesn't just read your profile: according to its page on how it gets information about businesses, it pulls from several sources, including the content of your official business website and what users contribute. If your website says one thing and your profile says another, you're giving Google two different answers about the same location.

You already picked your profile's category based on what your customer searches for, and that work doesn't repeat. This is different. You'll write this six or seven times: on your profile, on your website, on social media, on every directory where you appear. And it has to come out identical, character for character, all seven times.

Google doesn't say exactly how much weight a stray comma carries: it keeps the details of its algorithm secret. What it does say, in its tips for improving local ranking, is that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that inaccurate information can keep your profile out of searches in your area. And if you end up with two profiles for the same location, its help page on duplicate profiles warns that whichever one gets flagged as a duplicate won't show up in Search or Maps, and that merging two profiles requires them to contain the same information.

What "identical" really means

Name, address, and phone number. In the trade, it's called a business's NAP, and it doesn't matter what you call it: what matters is that there's one single version, not several near-matches. For the name, Google spells it out: according to its guidelines for representing your business, the name on your profile should match your business's real-world name, the one on your storefront, your website, and your office materials.

To a person, "123 Main Street" and "123 Main St." say the same thing. Google doesn't explain how it compares each version, but it does say that it's the one that decides how to display your address: according to those same guidelines, it works that out from your business information and data from other sources. If every source already says the same thing, there's nothing for it to choose between.

For the phone number, the guidelines call for a number that connects directly to your business, local if possible (one with your area code, not a call center's), and under your direct control. If your profile still lists the landline but you only answer your cell, anyone calling through Google dials a number nobody picks up, and that sounds like a closed business. The number on your profile and the one on your website should be the same: the one you actually answer.

Google says its local results come down mainly to relevance, distance, and prominence, which is how well-known your business is and depends on things like how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. That's not entirely in your hands: customers write reviews whenever they feel like it, and a link from another website depends on someone deciding to put it there. Keeping your information complete and accurate is entirely up to you, though. You can fix your NAP today, in one afternoon, by checking every site where your business shows up, one by one.

The single version, exactly as you copy it everywhere

Write this version once, in a separate document, and from then on copy and paste that same version every time, without tweaking it "to look nicer" anywhere. The order always stays the same: name, street address, suite or unit number if it applies, city, state, ZIP code, phone number.

Don't abbreviate "Avenue" as "Ave." in one place and spell it out in another, and don't list the zip code sometimes and skip it other times because "everyone already knows it." The same goes if your website carries local business structured data, the format Google documents for describing a business inside a page's code: the name, address, and phone number you put there are this same block.

Watch out with your legal entity type. Google's guidelines don't allow business-entity suffixes like "Inc." or "LLC" in your profile name, unless you can prove with signage, business cards, or invoices that it's always been part of your business's name. If your storefront says "Ortiz Bakery," the simple move is to make the name on your profile and your website footer "Ortiz Bakery," no "LLC." Your full legal name doesn't have to disappear from your website: Spain's Information Society Services Act requires you to keep your name or legal business name permanently accessible, and that information belongs in your legal notice, not in the name you present yourself under. It's the opposite with "Unit 3" or a floor number: Google allows you to include them in the address, and if they show up in one place, they should show up in all of them, in the same order and with the same punctuation.

What really costs you

Where to start

That same rule, not changing a single comma, doesn't apply to your description: there, it's not about repeating the same thing every time, it's about making sure every word is actually yours and wouldn't fit just as well on any other business on your street.