What Are Local Citations?
If you’ve ever done local SEO or have a business that competes locally, you know how challenging it can be. Local citations are an important part of local SEO that you need to get done to maximize your results. In many ways, local citations are the foundation of a brand’s local digital presence.
Citations are a vital signal for Google’s local search algorithm. For businesses to be considered trustworthy and credible by potential clients, they need to have proper local citations in popular online directories.
Local citations are much more than just business listings. It helps to think of business listings as a subset of local citations. A listing’s purpose is to encourage discoverability and direct engagement with your potential clients.
Citations, on the other hand, help with trust and reputation by building a network of consistent mentions across the online landscape. These are pivotal when it comes to local search engine rankings.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at how local citations can improve your local SEO metrics.
How Local Citations Can Help You with Local SEO
Improve Local Search Rankings
Getting better local rankings can be challenging, especially if you’re up against larger businesses. But with local citations, you stand more than a fighting chance of making it to the top! The most important part of your local SEO ecosystem is your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone).
Working on your local citations ensures they are consistent across all directory listings. It sends a positive signal for your business on Google’s Local Pack. Being featured on the Local Pack ensures that your business gets better visibility than paid ads, and that is a huge advantage.
With local citations, you get increased prominence for location-based searches. These include “near me” type of queries, which lead to a lot of traffic for your website. Citations also mean more discoverability on industry-specific platforms.
Better Online Visibility
Doing well on local SEO is all about visibility. With citation, you get improved brand visibility across multiple online directories.
Following citation strategies ensures that your business is listed on the Chamber of Commerce site, which is integral to your performance locally. It ensures more appearances on industry-specific websites, especially if you’re a niche business.
Improved brand name exposure is also vital to your long-term success, and getting citations right is key to that. Online directories like Yelp and TripAdvisor can help you gain more visibility than other methods of marketing can.
It lets you have multiple points of entry from local business aggregators, which in turn improves your customer frequency. Getting exposure through multiple channels means your business remains top-of-mind for the audience.
Enhanced Trust and Credibility
A major reason for you to focus on building local citations is the trust and credibility it provides, even in the short term.
Getting validated through multiple third-party sources can give you a noticeable boost to your traffic and conversion numbers. Getting positive reviews on high-authority platforms means better brand perception.
When potential clients visit your website, ensure that logos and badges from these third-party sources are above the fold of the website. Feature reviews from these websites on your website as well. These changes can considerably reduce bounce rates from potential customers.
Getting verified by trusted names in the business, like BBB (Better Business Bureau) and TrustPilot, goes a long way to instill confidence in your brand. Credibility is a vital signal, and it works with both people and search engines!
Elevate Your Google My Business Profile
The GMB page is something that many businesses don’t focus on, and this can be a huge mistake. But with local citations, you improve your GMB profile by ensuring consistent details across multiple sources.
The direct synchronization of citation data with GMB elevates it and ensures better rankings for your business for relevant queries.
It improves visibility and ranking across the board for your most important business keywords. With better citations, you also get higher accuracy on location-based services like Google Maps, which means more people find your business through your GMB.
Proper citations also mean Google’s “Local Finder” has a better chance of highlighting your business to searchers. Citations give your business more “context” when it comes to local queries, which means being featured more on searches.
Drive Referral Traffic to Your Website
Referral traffic is really important for businesses because they are more qualified as leads compared to other sources of traffic.
When you get your citations right, you get direct click-throughs from online directories. The best part is that with niche directories, your lead generation numbers will improve dramatically because of qualified traffic.
Links on high-authority websites can also contribute greatly to referral traffic. The difference between this and paid ads is that people on these authority websites are actively seeking your services. They are not clicking just because they saw it on their searches.
Better local citations also improve brand awareness, leading to more clicks on your CTAs from previously unvisited users. Setting up tracking for these different sources can give you detailed results about which citations perform better than others.
Build a Solid Backlink Profile
A great backlink profile is a prerequisite for all types of local SEO strategies, and it is not surprising to understand why. A set of links back to your website from high authority websites “endorses” it to their visitors. And this is not just something that only users follow, but search engine spiders do too.
Authority do-follow links from major directories and websites are great for improving your local relevance. In fact, even nofollow links benefit your website in that they drive traffic and trust. Citations help set up a naturally diverse link-building profile for your brand.
Links from locally relevant websites have a powerful effect on your domain authority (DA) and trust flow. Backlinks also mean better crawl rate by bots, which further reinforces your website as a resource for relevant search queries.
Improve Local Relevance
The best way to gain traction with your local audience is to ensure that your business is relevant to their interests.
With citations, you can build strong signals about your location and service area, which helps establish local relevance. With better citations, your business can also be featured in the “best of” category on searches and local social media communities.
While creating citations, ensure that you’ve selected the right categories in directories. Choosing the wrong category might result in inconsistencies, which can affect your rankings. Add proper business descriptions to your listings, making sure that you include the right keywords.
Encourage collaborations with other local businesses that work well with yours. For example, if you own a kitchen remodeling business, work with a high-end appliance vendor so both parties can mutually benefit.
Protect Against Negative SEO
Negative SEO is something that not many people want to talk about, but even with Google’s safeguards in place, it can still happen. By working on your local citations, you can dominate searches with accurate listings. It ensures that inaccurate or malicious information gets pushed down naturally on SERPs.
Citations provide a stream of positive and controlled information about your business. It helps build brand communities that push back against false narratives about your business. Owning your “digital real estate” is an advantage, citations allow businesses, and it is integral when fighting negative SEO attempts.
Mitigating the impact of fake reviews and correcting false NAP data is much quicker with an established local citation network.
Tips to Get Local Citations
Start With the Foundation
To improve local citations, the first thing you need to do is optimize your GMB. Claim your profile, if you haven’t already, and then work on improving it. Ensure all your NAP details are accurate so there is no confusion with location-based services.
Spruce it up by adding high-quality images of both inside and outside of your business. Customers are more likely to visit businesses that maintain a neat and professional look.
Make use of data aggregators like Factual, Localeze, and Infogroup to push information about your business to several websites. Other important directories include Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Apple Business Connect.
Research Your Competitors
More often than not, competitors can help you come up with citation gaps that you didn’t know you had. There are SEO spy tools available that can help you identify the citation platforms they use. This helps you discover niche-specific directories that you might have missed on the initial pass.
To ensure more actionable information, thoroughly analyze their listing consistency and quality. This includes the business description and choice of category. Getting enough information on them to reverse-engineer their citation campaign is an effective strategy.
Ensure Consistent NAP+W Format
One of the biggest factors when it comes to local citations is the consistency of your information. While we have constantly heard of NAP, NAP+W listings include the address of your website as well.
Inconsistency when it comes to NAP+W can cause serious headaches for both you and search engine spiders crawling your website.
To them, any difference in address constitutes a new business, which is not at all what you want. The best option here would be to create a simple text file that has all the details and copy and paste from this wherever necessary.
Key Takeaways
- Check your citations thoroughly for accuracy and consistency.
- Claim and optimize your profiles on major platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, and Apple Business Connect.
- Ensure that your NAP+W details are standardized so they are consistent across all the directories you post to.
- Research and reverse engineer your competitors’ citations to get valuable insights into your own process.
- Clean and optimize incorrect listings on all platforms to improve trust.
- Monitor your citation profiles to ensure that there are no discrepancies with the added information.