Introduction

When running a local company, you still have to engage in online marketing to get as many customers as possible. You also need to give accurate and vital information about your business to ensure you reach enough clients. Local citations are a crucial element in helping you get all the necessary details to searchers. Further, managing them boosts your rankings and visibility in the local search queries.

Having appropriate links keeps you ahead of your competitors since potential clients can easily find your business. In case you don’t know what are local citations, this article will give you all the insightful details you need to learn.

What are Local citations?

A local citation is an online reference that contains your business’s names, the address, and phone number (NAP). It can occur on your venture’s website, apps, social media platforms, and directories. The listings help your searchers find all the essential details about your enterprise within their geographical location. Therefore, you will attract the attention you need for your enterprise. For example:

Components of a Local Citation

Your local citation should include critical features about your venture’s name, the address, and phone number. You can also have some of the following listed elements;

• Company description
• Reviews
• Email addresses
• Operating hours
• Videos
• Images
• Attributes
• Forms of payment accepted
• Geo-coordinates

For instance:

Types of Local Citations

There are two types of local citation that you can use as discussed below;

Structured Citations

The most popular way of presenting a NAP is through structured sources. Using this method, you list the three components consistently with the other listings on your site. A good example is social media profiles and directory listings where each organization’s details get displayed the same way.

Unstructured Citations

You may not find this type often used, but it’s also valuable to your site. In unstructured citations, you spread out the company details across your webpages. Hence, you include all the vital information on one page, but they are not together. It may require extra effort for search engines to locate all the details, but it still adds value to your web page. They can appear on various things like forum threads, press mentions, blog posts, and more.

Benefits of Local Citations

Your company benefits in a lot of ways when you implement local citations, as discussed below;

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It Helps to Boost your SEO

When users look for enterprises within their area, Google uses local search engine optimization to give location-based outcomes. If your business is within that locality, you have more chances of getting a new client when you utilize local citations. It doesn’t matter the kind of venture you run from a medical office, restaurant to an auto body shop. Also, note that customers have adapted to using the internet in search of goods and services, especially when they are in a new location.

FACT: Over a two year period, there was a 900%+ growth in mobile searches for “___ near me today/tonight.” (Hubspot)

Secondly, you also increase your chance of getting a higher rank in search engines. As a result, your SEO efforts get enhanced, and your enterprise gains more visibility for your target customers. Google crawlers also depend on your site’s business information to confirm whether your company is authentic. You should ensure that everything is clear and polished so that search engines do not have any confusion.

For instance, if you have listed your enterprise as XYZ Construction, Inc in some directories whereas you use XYZ construction in others, it may make search engines view it as two businesses. The inconsistency also leads to a lower ranking of your company on SERPs.

You can get the highest optimization benefits from your listings by doing the following;

• Adding more helpful information such as what your organization offers
• Include a link back to a relevant landing page or the homepage of your website
• Eliminate listing from directories that are not within your industry or niche

To enhance your Visibility

An online directory lets you filter outcomes by specific categories based on sections such as location, services, among many. When you use local citations, you will enhance your visibility among clients looking for local businesses. When clients search for a service or product within your geographical area, they keep seeing your company on top of search engine outcomes.

To Boost your Business’s Reputation

Most of the local business directories, such as Google My Business, allows you to post reviews. Positive testimonials help your company get a good reputation among potential clients since they trust other customers’ experience, impacting SEO. For example:

In case you get some criticism on this section from a few clients, making correct responses will keep your reputation intact. The majority of the customers are confident about your services when they realize that you are making a genuine effort to resolve issues.

To Attract Potential Investors, Clients, and Partners

In most cases, you may think that local listing is only meant to lure customers into your business, but they have more significant impacts. If you deal with other investors or companies in the area, utilizing citation helps you attract their attention.

You can make your B2B citations more alluring by doing the following;

• Add some links to your social media platforms that can give more details about your venture
• Include contact information to specific people within the organization such as the local sales manager
• Add a reference to the leading products and services that your company deals with

To Outdo your Competitors

It would be helpful if you assume that all your competitors within your niche use local citations. Hence, you should pay attention to their moves to ensure that you are a step ahead. Note that, if searchers get information on other ventures much more quickly than yours, you will likely lose a considerable customer base.

FACT: 39% of smartphone users are more likely to browse or shop a company or brand’s mobile app because it’s easier or faster to make a purchase. (Hubspot)

Using Business Directories is cost-effective

If you want to use other techniques like pay-per-click ads, it may be a bit more costly than business directories. Most of the guides allow you to submit local listings at no cost. On the other hand, others require you to pay a small fee for some features such as;

• Uploading videos and photos that relate to your enterprise
• Making additional web links, categories or maps
• Including more company location listings

If you use Google My Business and claim your company, you get awarded a free business listing, which can be seen on searching engine queries. It helps you improve your visibility to potential customers on Google maps, making it simpler to find your company’s location. Here is that page:

You get Additional links back to your Pages from trusted and Authoritative Sites

If you get more links back from authoritative and trusted sites, it helps your webpage to achieve better SEO results. Additionally, almost every business directory has a website URL field, while others even display ‘dofollow’ links. Therefore, search engines can utilize such pages to get link equity to your website, improving your SEO.

How to Build Citations for a Business

You can benefit from either having unstructured or structured citations, but you don’t have to get them on each page. It would help if you considered creating quality links to leap the highest benefits. Below are steps on how to build citations for a business;

Get Listed with Data Aggregators

Note that there are multiple business directories; thus, there would be many gaps if they depend on NAP submissions from business owners. It’s due to lack of website submissions from many companies. Therefore, to solve the problem, data aggregators collect details about organizations and distribute it to other sites. As a result, your company gets lots of citations in various places. It’s a very accurate way of citation building, which gets you across important online directories and website listings. Here are the top 4 data aggregation companies:

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Submit to Other key Sites

Relying on data aggregators can deliver multiple NAP details to various sites, but they also leave out others. Hence, it would help if you take the initiative to submit to some essential pages directly in your country.

Here is a local citation sites list that you can consider;

• YellowPages
• BBB
• Facebook
• Yelp
• Foursquare
• Bing Places
• Apple Maps

You don’t have to submit to all of them, but you can conduct a background search on those that get more traffic. When submitting your company link to your preferred websites, you can use two options;

Manual Submission

If you have ample time and you don’t mind going through various technical tasks, you can opt to submit to each site at a time. Start by searching for your company on each site to confirm if it exists on a particular site. In case you find it on either page, ensure that all the details are accurate.

You can look for the option to claim listings to assist you in correcting errors and give additional information about your enterprise. For instance, when using Yelp, you can add multiple details and photos once you make a listing claim. On the other hand, add your links where they don’t exist.

You may find the process a little bit tedious, but you can use Yext Business Scan to make your work more comfortable and less time-consuming. The tool automates the procedure of checking whether your listing is in the most critical sites. While using it, enter your company details to get a report of your listings’ nature. If you get any errors or missing information, go to the site and make the necessary corrections.

Using a Submission and Management Service

You will most likely not like to make submissions manually due to the time required and the process involved. You can depend on some companies that have built a solution to make the process much more comfortable. Yext is a significant player since some platforms only allow you to make submissions through this tool.

You can also opt to use other platforms such as Whitespark and Brightlocal. Note that using some of these sites also incurs some costs. However, your primary objective should be boosting your SEO, although it will still bear the expected results if you learn to do it manually.

Submit to some Prominent local and Industry Sites

It’s crucial to look for some of the well-known citations for local business opportunities.

For instance, if you are a real estate agent, you should make sure your links feature in realtor.com. It would also help if your business gets listed in TripAdvisor when you are in the hospitality industry. Such opportunities are industry-specific; thus, you will enjoy the direct benefits of local citations’ since they indicate your precise physical location.

Still, if you want to get citations for local business, you can use a few detailed methods as outlined below;

Using Google

Using Google seems to be more straightforward than you expect. First, go to the search engine and search for simple queries like;

• (industry) company directory
• (industry) company listing

From the numerous results you get, scrutinize the various sites to know the worth of your submission. Remember, it’s not mandatory to use all the pages to achieve the highest SEO outcomes. Here are the top listings on a Google search:

Using the Ahrefs link Intersecting tool

In most cases, citations have NAP and website URLs, but you will find that the backlinks are ‘nofollowed.’ However, it would be helpful if you didn’t overlook them; instead, use these links to advance your citation opportunities. Here is what that page looks like:

Start by searching for competing businesses on Google and paste at least three of their homepages’ URLs in the Link Intersect Tool. Go to the bottom field, and add the URL of your homepage, then set the modes to ‘URL.’ Next, tap on ‘Show link opportunities’ to get the websites that link to the various homepages you entered. You can then click on the caret to learn more about each link and see the SEO metrics, highlighting the estimated traffic. You can also quickly gauge whether the site is popular to know if you can link your page.

Pursue Unstructured Citations

Unstructured citations are a little different to deal with, keeping in mind that they come from reviews, press mentions, and blogs. Consequently, an external person has to find it worthy of writing about your venture.

Here are a few ways to help you find unstructured citation building opportunities;

Using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

Most of the unstructured citations have links to the business’s website; thus, you have a chance to scrutinize your competitors’ backlinks. For instance, if you run a Houston restaurant, you can enter a competitor’s domain in Ahrefs Site Explorer. Set the mode to URL, then go to the backlinks report and filter the ‘Dofollow’ links. Carefully check for trends that might present some opportunities for citation building. For example:

Using HARO

HARO is a popular site among journalists that assists them in getting sources for upcoming posts and stories. It’s free to use thus; you can try it out via the following process;

• You start by signing up
• The platform avails daily email notifications with queries from journalist
• You are supposed to give a quote or answer the question
• Lastly, if they use your feedback in an upcoming article, you get quoted

It may seem laborious, but you can try it out since your site gets high-quality links and citations.

How to Examine and Boost your Local Citations

If you want to do a citation audit, you can opt to do it manually and still uncover variations of your site’s NAP and all listings. Alternatively, you can use Moz local to assist you in doing quick scrutiny. On this tool, enter your company’s name on the input bar, then your zip code on the right, and tap on ‘check my business listing.’

The tool shows all the corresponding listings related to your site, starting from the high authority platforms. It also displays the inconsistencies in your citations. You can write them down in a spreadsheet and make sure you correct the errors.

Note that the results you get on Moz local are from top indexing platforms that the tool has tagged. Consequently, there is a possibility that your page may still have more local citations from structured and less authoritative sources, which may not have as much impact.

Conclusion

From the above guide, it’s clear that you need to pay attention to local citations to boost your website’s visibility. Further, note that local citations are crucial for search engines to give information about your company’s location and what you do. One of the benefits of local citations is they help to lure potential customers to your site leading to a higher customer base. You can also include various elements on your citations to ensure that clients and other organizations get ample details about your business.

Diib®: Access Your Local Citations and Listings Here!

When you use accurate links, they impact your rankings since search engines find it logical to prioritize a page that gets more mentions and attention. Also, when your site gets numerous links, especially from local citation sites, it means you have something valuable. Diib can help you monitor and keep track of all your citations, whether they’re local or not. Here are some of the features that we know you’ll love:

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• Sync your Facebook profile to give you insights into the specifics of your social media campaign. Things like individual post performance, demographics of users, best time of day to post and conversions.
• A monthly collaborative session with a Diib growth expert that can help you fine tune your local SEO efforts and guide you to growth and success.

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