Best Local Citation Building Practices in 2022 and Beyond
If you want your local business to show up high in Google search, first, you'll want to know about the best local citation building practices.
Local citations play a huge role in your SEO strategy.
Listing your website and your company contact details on credible websites and directories helps Google to identify that your business is real and operating in the area you are located.
It also helps Google and other search engines understand the kind of business you are.
As a result, citations help your Google My Business listing and website appear higher in local search results.
What is a Local Citation in SEO?
Simply put, a local citation is a listing of your business information on another website.
The mention of your business name and company details alone is another signal to Google and will give you an extra boost with in the local algorithm.
When registering your details on business directories and other citation sources, the Name, Address and Telephone Number are also known as "NAP".
Within the local SEO Community, your NAP is considered the most important part of your profile, as this identifies the location and contact details of your business.
In addition, your local listing will likely include a business description, operating hours and also the services or products offered.
This is very important, as Google search results favour local businesses with accurate information over listings without any details filled out.
Building citations is a crucial component of search engine optimisation as they show search engines that your business has a real physical location.
What are the Different Types of Citation Building?
There are two types of citations, structured and unstructured citations.
Structured Citations
Structured citations are mentions of your company on third party websites which include your business name, telephone number and business address.
These are usually come in the form of data aggregators, online business directories. High authority directories include Google My Business, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, Foursquare, Yell and many others.
Unstructured Citations
These are listings on any other external websites that come in the form of blog posts, press release and videos etc.
Structured and unstructured will also fall into one of two categories, local or niche citations. Local citations are area specific, while niche focus more on the industry specific directories.
SEO citations can also be a variation of dofollow and nofollow backlinks.
The more do follow backlinks you pick up, the more juice you'll be able to squeeze out of your listings, empowering your domain authority and your search rankings in both Google Maps and the organic search results.
What are the Best Local Citation Building Practices?
- Complete Your Business Profile in Full
- NAP and Google Maps
- Avoid Duplicate Locations
- Spy on Your Competitors Link Strategy
- Get More Online Reviews
- Share and Link to your Directory Listings!
Complete Your Business Profile in Full
When setting up your citations one way to maximise your efforts is completing your local citation profiles in full. Although this sounds simple enough most companies register their listings only using their name, address, phone number and their hours of operation.
Don't just cover the basics. You'll want to utilise all features in your listing being as descriptive as possible including business logo, images, videos and much content as can.
NAP and Google Maps
Your business relies on customers visiting your store. Inaccurate citations of your business found online will confuse the search engines and may even lead your customer to a completely different destination.
This is bad for your online presence and in some cases detrimental to your bottom line.
To maintain consistency of your NAP profile, it?s important that your business name, address and phone number are mentioned the same across all of your listings. A few ways these details may show incorrectly are:
- A change in business name
- A change in business location
- A change in phone number
- Incorrect data input by you or others or software
Keep track of all your listings in a spreadsheet, along with the login details and passwords. By ensuring you have these details at hand, you can easily log in at a later date and change the details when necessary.
Clean Up and Avoid Duplicate Locations
If you are doing your own SEO citation building or you have hired multiple agencies in the past for your marketing efforts, it's likely your business has gained duplicate listings on a number of sites along the way.
To maintain a clean profile and get the most value out of your link's, then cleaning up your profiles or inaccurate citations is one way you can improve your website's trust flow.
Although local citation building can be long and tedious it's advised you to remove these listings either manually, by using a local SEO service or by using one of the many reputable automated services such as:
These services are highly recommended. However, they can either be pricey or limited to the number of directories that are available to you.
In the more competitive industries, you?ll have to go above and beyond these listings to outrank your competition.
Get More Online Reviews and Boost SEO Rankings
Most online consumers need to be encouraged to write a review on the services you have provided.
Whether you automate the process or ask them directly, pushing for reviews is something all businesses should practice.
Choose your most important directories and use them in your emails to customers, post them on social media and include links with in your content of your website.
When requesting a review, ask the customer to be as descriptive as possible and guide them to writing the perfect review to improve the trust of your brand's reputation.
When asking for Google My Business reviews, you?ll want to ask your customer to include the business name, the service provided and the area you are targeting.
As one of Google's top ranking factors, this will result in better positioning within the search engine's map pack and higher search rankings in Googles SERP's, helping you outrank your local competitors.
Spy on your Competitor's Website Link Building Strategy!
Are you ready to dive into detective mode?
Great!
If you are heading down the DIY route, and you are looking for more quality backlinks, then scoping out your competitor's citation profile can be an easy way to find quality business listings you are missing out on.
At Local Rank Booster, we like to use an SEO tool called Spyglass. We use this for managing our backlink campaigns and for spying on what links are working best for our competitors.
This way, we can easily identify some great opportunities for improving our link building strategy.
There are many other tools available for you to spy on your competitors and analyse their backlinks.
Here are a few examples of other SEO tools you can use for your strategy.
Share and Link to your Directory Listings!
Once you have put in the hard work building quality citations and generating reviews, share those profile and reviews on social platforms and bookmarking sites like Pinterest for extra traffic.
Doing this will improve the page power and increase the value of the backlinks to your website.
Choose which of your online directory profiles are most important for your SEO efforts, and ensure to add links where you can.
You'll want to make sure the profiles you are linking to include a dofollow link to your website and have descriptive text.
For example the naked url (https://exaplewebsite.com) or the brand name (Example Website) or the main service you provide.
Dofollow links with keyword rich anchor text will pass more power over links such as Visit Website or Click Here.
Summary
A good way to get in front of potential customers for free is a Google Business listing and registering to the major directories.
In a nutshell, if you do not have local citations in place already, it is probably the number one move for your business to make right now.
To help you out, I have put together a high quality list of citations and a fill in the blank spreadsheet you can use to speed up and keep track of your citation building efforts.
Check out the link to download your free copy of 150+ local citation listings spreadsheet.
Need a Local Citation Service to Take Care of Your Listings?
If you would like to hire a local SEO company rather than take all that time listing them yourself, feel free to reach out to us or book a free SEO consultation to find out how we can help you best.