Engineer builds plain-JS NAP checker to solve local SEO string-matching problems

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A developer has published a detailed writeup on the engineering challenges of building a free NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency checker for local SEO purposes. The tool is built using plain JavaScript without any framework, relying on a few HTTP calls to compare business listings across directories like Google, Yelp, and Apple Maps. The core problem is that identical businesses are stored differently across platforms — with varied phone formats, name abbreviations, and address styles — making simple string equality checks unreliable. The author outlines separate normalization pipelines for each field: stripping phone numbers to a 10-digit national significant number, lowercasing and de-suffixing business names, and using token overlap scoring instead of exact string comparison. The writeup aims to help developers close the gap between human-readable similarity and machine-level matching without over-fuzzing results to the point where distinct businesses appear identical.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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