Outdated and incorrect listings can negatively impact the user experience, causing consumers to lose trust in a brand or worse, post a negative review. This is a list of the top three results that appear in local searches, ranked by relevance, distance and prominence.
In order to provide Google with all the information it requires to rank your location favourably, there are seven key elements that go towards a holistic SEO strategy. Citations is one of them. The Local Search Ecosystem shows the information flow between search engines, data aggregators, directories, review sites, social platforms and GPS mapping solutions. A regular audit is important to identify duplicate listings, optimise and update existing citations and highlight any new citations.
Managing multiple locations across multiple citations is incredibly time consuming and prone to human error. Say it takes five minutes to update the opening hours of one location in one directory. If you have 50 locations, it would take 4 weeks.
Automising citations means this task only takes 5 minutes in total. Update the hours centrally and one click of a button magically disperses the information across all channels. Another benefit of automation is that all your updated citations will be less prone to human error. Listing management tools can also keep your citation building consistent by sending and updating your business information to different online platforms independently.
If you want to see what your citations are saying about your business, Google has a tool to show you how your business shows up in searches. Think Main St. We already mentioned claiming pages on sites such as Yelp or Google My Business, but you will also want to optimize your listings. Add enough information to give customers a good understanding of what your business does.
Add a description and a few photos of your business. And remember that many of these sites allow users to review your business, so you should be keeping an eye on those reviews too. Respond to negative reviews and try to make things right for the reviewer. Be present, and make sure your customers are happy. Even if you do show up correctly in local searches, unanswered negative reviews can be extremely damaging for a small business.
Make sure to reply to negatives and try to make it right for the reviewer. And don't forget you need to consistently be getting new reviews. Check out this post for more on the importance of online reviews. For building brand new citations, you can always start with that list of data aggregators we mentioned earlier. Beyond that, you can search for industry-specific or location-specific directories, or even search for your competitors to find out which citation sources list their businesses.
Here's the list of citation sources by city. And the list of citation sources by industry. And remember to aim for quality, rather than quantity with your citations. Make sure your business is listed on the important websites we've mentioned, instead of going for a huge quantity of citations. If you want your business to be found online, clean up your citations and make sure your business is listed on those important directories. Who has the time to clean up citations, anyway?
Go to this page to find a local consultant and schedule a free digital marketing consultation for your business today! Isabella Andersen, Content Contributor. Subscribe to our email list to get the latest digital marketing content delivered to your inbox each week!
First Name. Last Name. In the meantime, check out our free marketing resources, including blogs, videos and infographics. Learn More. We use cookies to improve user experience. For more information, visit our Privacy Policy. This is where local SEO citations come into play.
Read this post to learn how to build citations! This is a long post, so skip to the section that matters most to you: Introduction What are citations? Types of Citations How to Build Citations Citation Building Checklist Introduction to Citation Building The easy part about local SEO citation building and local search success in general is that you just need to state the obvious where your business is located, business hours and phone number, etc.
Here's how local search can have an impact on your business: 88 percent of consumers search for local information on mobile devices 51 percent of on-the-go searches have local intent Conversions are more than twice as likely after a local search compared to searches without local intent What does all this have to do with building citations?
What are citations for local SEO? How do you do this? This is where citation building comes into play for local SEO. The one above looks like a directory listing. We can confirm that by visiting the referring page.
Hit the caret on any site on the list to see its SEO metrics, including estimated organic traffic. This can help you tell how popular the site is, and whether getting listed is a priority.
Unstructured citations are a different beast altogether. They tend to come from press mentions, reviews, and blog posts about your business. Someone actually has to care enough about your business to write about it. For example, Milk Beach, a London coffee shop, gets cited in this article from GQ about the best coffee shops in London:. One low-hanging source of unstructured citations is supplier pages.
Lots of businesses have these. They list and link out to the companies they supply, or that supply them. You can find these quite easily in Google.
Just make a list of your suppliers, find their websites, then search for something like:. You can also just look through their sites. For instance, if we eyeball the report for Milk Beach, there are a lot of links and citations from lists of the best brunches in London.
Is that useful information? It depends. But if it does, and if your customers regularly rave about it, it might be worth getting in contact with some of these bloggers and journalists. For example, the lady behind this blog cites her five favorite brunch locations in this article :. So it might be worth sending her a friendly email, and perhaps even inviting her down for a bite to eat. If she takes us up on our offer, she might add the shop to her post or even write a standalone review. This one comes from a gluten-free food blogger.
But assuming we have some tasty options for celiacs, we could look for other gluten-free food bloggers in London and reach out to them. It cites tons of businesses:. You can see that while this process requires a bit of common sense and creativity, it can uncover some fantastic opportunities. Is it going to work for every business? Of course not.
For both structured and unstructured citations, you need to do your best to keep them accurate and consistent. That means not having one phone number in one place, and a completely different number in another. This is not only thought to be bad for local SEO, but it also erodes the trust of consumers.
As long as everything else matches address, phone number, website, etc.
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