If you’re moving offices you will have a packing list. Aside from all of the physical elements you will be moving, have you made a list for everything you need to do to move your organisation digitally?
Think about local search
One of our longstanding clients recently moved offices – not very far from their original location, but still a big change for their business. They went from having their offices located just within the limits of London that still retain London postcodes, to moving just beyond that limit into Greater London.
As a company that relies heavily on their proximity to clients and promoting their location to potential overseas employees, this move could have affected their visibility in local search had we not been clever with their listings.
Update your NAP Information
Your company’s Name, Address, and Phone number are just three pieces of contact information that needs to be standardised across not only your site, but in all places your company is mentioned. Your site URL, contact email address and opening hours (if applicable) are pieces of data that need to be uniform across the internet.
Moving digital packing list
We made sure to update our client’s information on the following locations:
Own site Social platforms Partner sites Review sites Google Maps Bing Maps (yes, even Bing!)
Whether you handle content management and social in-house or through an agency like Keytools, it is relatively easy to coordinate the first two points. And that’s usually as far as companies think in terms of updating their NAP information.
The truth is, if your contact information on your site conflicts with partner or review sites – or worse, Google Maps – users are less likely to see you as a legitimate business and view you as less credible than your competitors.
Making the change
We coordinated the NAP changes with our client so that all of their bases were covered come Moving Day; we made the changes on the site, half of their social platforms and both maps while they updated the rest. This method worked out quite well, as everything was changed on or immediately after Moving Day.
The result
While we made sure all of the NAP was standardised as much as possible, we hit a few bumps with Google Maps. As our client moved farther out into Greater London, pesky Google would not accept ‘London’ as their new town, but wanted to input the more regional area name.
Challenge accepted! To get round this we added ‘London’ to the county, and made sure that the NAP information on other sites and platforms matched up.
What this means is that we had to go through the site and add extra mentions of their new location in West London, and that we had to find more local businesses for them to partner with in order to maintain their visibility for London based searches.
So, if your business is planning on moving offices, make sure to add the digital packing list to your physical one, and make sure to plan ahead to stay on top of your brand’s visibility in local search.
Have any questions or want to discuss this with us? Leave a comment here or phone us on 0207 2400100 to see how we can help you in local search.