Citations for Local Business Success

Local Directories assist in creating links between sites, and thereby assist in directing potential new clients to your website.  In the past few years these directories have become very popular sites for reviewing and rating services and products.  75% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations, and 50% of consumers surveyed said they’re more likely to make a purchase from a local business with a positive reputation.

Citations are generally accepted as any mention of your business on other sites, either in name alone or the actual address. An actual hyperlink isn’t even necessary. For instance, you might have your business listed among a yellow page directory despite having no actual link there. Citations are also often located in local Chamber of Commerce listings, as well as association pages for local businesses. These will generally contain your basic information at the very least.

Citations are crucial to your local search engine optimization campaign success given the search engine ranking algorithms of popular platforms such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. If your business has more citations than another competing local business, people will be able to find you more easily, earning you a higher volume of customers. Businesses that pay no mind to how well they’re doing online will often lose out these days.

With all of that in mind, you should try to get citations from already established portals with strong indexing already in place. Superpages.com is just one example. These kind of citations will make sure the search engines actually value your business and its corresponding website. The more your general information is posted from legitimate sources, the more the search engines will reward you with their trust and promotion.

Citations can also help businesses that don’t actually have their own websites. This is especially true for entities that don’t have as much competition in their particular area. If there isn’t a wealth of information being promoted by the company themselves, the search engines have to rely on any existing citations.

Validation for businesses that are integral to communities can also be earned via citations. It’s rather difficult for anyone to fake a membership to something like the local Chamber of Commerce. The same can be said of city business indexes or representation in local newspaper articles that have been posted online. These kind of citations can help boost the search engine rankings of a local business in an invaluable fashion.

How To Get More Citations & Improve Your Search Engine Rank

There are a myriad of sources where you can build citations that mention your business name, address, web URL, phone number, and other contact information. Every single business should put it’s focus towards establishing citations that enhance their overall visibility, as well as how valid search engines consider them in relation to whatever their particular niche may be. The trust of search engines like Google is absolutely vital. That means you can’t just get your citations from anywhere; they have to be listed on sites with established authority, not just spammed anywhere possible. The following sources are where you should put your focus:

1 – Data Aggregators

The four primary local business aggregators in the United States are Neustar Localeze, Infogroup, Factual, and Acxiom. These all have their own individual indexes of a staggering 20 million or so businesses located all over the entire country. The info in the indexes is largely built on publicly available information such as that found in phone books, rosters for business group memberships, records of bank and phone info, and registration database entries.

Most of these type of aggregators license out their data in a syndicated fashion. Search engines tend to pick these up, especially the local listings on the top dogs like Google. The time that it might take for a major search engine to actually update what’s been indexed will always vary, but you can expect it to take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

2 – Local Search Engine Results

As frequently mentioned above, the major search engines of the world (such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing) all crawl the entirety of the internet for citations that help them give validation to the information that exists about your business. As you accrue listings on sites like Yelp, Hotfrog, Foursquare, and even social media profiles you run, all of your relevant business information will be further validated, meaning you will show up much higher in any relevant local search results. This is invaluable in helping more and more potential customers find their way through your doors.

3 – Local Blog Listings

Blogs run by local residents with a focus on what’s going on in your town are also important, if not the most major citation source. There’s a lot of variety to be found here, but simply searching for your city and “blog” after will likely turn up some promising results that you might be able to look further into.

4 – Local Directories

Much like blogs, there are also often locally run directories indexing various information about the business in the area. These can easily feed into the major search engines’ efforts to establish more valid citations. Anything that’s actually run and moderated manually is very much in your favor, as automated indexes can easily look illegitimate.

5 – Industry Based Directories

Finally, you may find citations on any directory that deals with whatever industry you’re performing in specifically. For instance, a pie bakery might find itself on an index that only hosts pie shops. These kind of directories are very valuable since they help people that are searching for very specific terms associate what they need with your business.

6 – competitor analysis

Use online tools to analyse you competitors and get a list of citation to add your business to, Visit  Bright Local or White Spark for more info.