A Definitive Guide To Citations SEO

Want to make sure that people looking for your business find you quickly?

To be found on the top of Google Searches your business website has to be optimized for Local SEO.

The higher you rank, the more likely potential customers are to find your site. 

For this, you can surely go for Citations SEO.

Don’t know what is local citation SEO and how to do it?

Hmm… No Worries,

This blog will provide you with a definitive guide to Citations SEO and a list of 500+ citation sites that will help your local business rank at the top of Google.

So let’s get started:

What Are Citations In SEO?

Citations are basically the reference of your business website to get listed on high-quality citation sites.

This can be done by including the Business Name, Address, and Phone Number of the website.

It is a process that helps your business increase its reach and visibility online.

Now that you know what a citation is, let’s see why are they important for your business’s local SEO.

Why Are Citations Important For SEO?

Citations are important to help your business improve its local SEO ranking and visibility.

Which can increase your business reach to potential customers.

Also, citation building can help you build trust and credibility with your local audience.

There are many reasons why citations are important for SEO, but here are the top 2 of them:

Help You Get More Customers Online

It is found that around 54% of Americans who performed a local search on their mobile phone tend to visit that website within 24 hours.

This means,

If your website is registered on a high-quality site that provides local citation SEO services, you can get more customers online.

Let’s say,

You have a well-optimized website of your local multicuisine restaurant based in San Francisco.

Now you want to attract more CUSTOMERS!!!

How can you do this?

Simply registering your website on free business citation sites such as “Yelp.com”

Will allow your website to reach more potential customers whenever they search to visit a multi-cuisine restaurant near them

See the image below:

This shows how listing on citations can help you drive more organic traffic,

Also, as the data show, there is a jump in the CTR of the website after a certain period of bane.

Help You Rank Higher In Local Search Queries

For a successful SEO campaign, citations SEO is very important as it helps you rank higher in local search results.

Being registered with good and trusted NAP citations signal Google to make your website rank higher in the search results.

See the live example below:

For this, you have to be relevant as well as consistent. 

Make sure that your website is listed in the right citation sites. 

That is…

If you have a business related to “Cakes”, obviously your website should not be listed in the citation sites for “Fruits”.

Google, in this case, will simply not consider your website for rankings.

These are the two main reasons for why citations are important for SEO. 

Types Of Citations

Before we learn more about citations seo, let’s check what are the types of citations seo. 

Here are two categories of citations:

Structured Citations

A structured citation contains the NAP (Name, Address, and PhoneNumber) of your business.

It may also contain logos, photos, website links, hours of operation, services description, videos, category of business, reviews, and more.

The image below is an example of a structured citation.

Unstructured Citations

Sometimes, platforms such as online news articles, posts, or blogs mention your business.

These platforms aren’t specifically designed to be citations, therefore they are known as unstructured citations.

How To Find Citation Opportunities?

There are a number of both paid and free business citation sites that you can use to find citation opportunities.

Though, you can not list your online business on all of them.

But you have to select the citation site that is the most relevant for your business.

Guess what, this can be done by using local citation software like

Moz

Moz provides a list of various categories of citations. See below;

You can easily identify the best-suited category relevant to your niche with this tool. 

WhiteSpark

WhiteSpark helps you discover a wide range of citations site, compares those with your current citations and reveals the opportunities you can avail yourself.

How To Build Citations?

Now is the time to know how to build Citations as it is aan important part of citations SEO. 

Every business wants to be listed on top with the help of local citation services. There‘s a huge benefit of getting listed on top of local citation websites.

But also, there is no need to be listed on every citation. Here are the four steps that you can follow to build Citations.

Get Registered With The Main 3 Aggregators Of The United States

This is an important part for citations SEO. There are thousands of business citations with different business categories.

It is obvious that most business owners will not submit their details on every citation.

So here comes the role of “Data Aggregators”

Data aggregators solve this problem.

They collect the information about the businesses and submit it to hundreds of business citation sites.

If these aggregators have your information, you’ll end up in many citations.

In the US, there are three data aggregators:

1. Factual

With Factual, you can no longer directly edit information related to your website.

But you go for one of their TDC (Trusted Data Contributors) for which you may have to pay a fee.

TDC includes citations like WhiteSpark or Yest. But in my opinion, it is not worth it for many businesses and you don’t have to worry about facts.

Next up is,

2. Express Update by ( InfoGroup)

It is completely free to submit and manage business listings with InfoGroup (ExpressUpdate).

Let me show you how

Just write your business name, and search for it. If you can locate your business, claim it.

Else, you can submit a new one.

Make sure to search for your business thoroughly before making any claim or submitting a new listing.

3. Neustar Localeze

Localeze publishes your listing information to the largest authorized local search platform network in the industry.

Find And Submit To Famous Citations Sites

The three aggregates distribute the NAP information to several well-known sites, but not to each of them.

That is why you should get listed on other citation sites also. 

Some of the famous citation sites in the US are

1. Apple Maps

2. Facebook

3. Bing

4. Yelp

5. FourSquare

6. BBB

There are plenty of citation sites available and a lot of overlap making it difficult to find out the best of them, they’re rarely identical.

So go through the list and get listed on the most worthy and relevant sites.

Listing your website on a citation with hardly any traffic won’t benefit you.

Your main motive is to rank your business website, to make that happen choose those sites which drive the most traffic.

How will you know which site drives the most traffic?

Here you go…

Go search for your business name on Google

For example, if we search for “Furniture Outlet in New York”, we see www.yelp.com in the search result.

Now in terms of submitting your website, there are two ways to do it

1. You Can Submit Your Website Manually

If you have ample time to invest, you can go for this option. Just search for your business on each site and submit your website.

If it is already listed make you the information is correct. You’ll get information like Name, Address, Phone Number, Timings, Map Locations, and much more.

Here how it looks like…

Now that you have found your website, claim it so that you can add more information about your business.

This might be a tedious and too time-consuming task for you. 

To make it simple and quick, I have a tool for that.

Yext’s Business Scan effectively scans the important sites and tells you whether you have listed on those sites or not.

All you have to do is enter your business information and you get to see:

This report will show you the details which are missing or incorrect in your listing.

Looking into it later, you can easily make the required changes to your website details.

2. Use A Submission And Management Service

Submitting the same information every time that too by doing it by hand will be quite hard.

That’s why companies have got the solution to make this process a bit easy.

One of them is Yext, they integrate with 100s of citations making it easy to make changes from one place only.

This means Yext isn’t the only company but there are more such companies like 

WhiteSpark, BrightLocal, and many more.

Now it is up to you whether you want to go the long way by going for the manual option or the well-known company.

Pursue Unstructured Citations

As we’ve already discussed Unstructured Citation SEO, 

Let’s quickly move forward,

And discuss a few ways to find unstructured citation opportunities.

1. Use Google

This is considered an easy-to-grab source of unstructured citations. These are called ‘supplier pages’.

Most businesses have these. They list or link out to the sites they supply or, that supply them.

Here’s how you can do this;

Just make the list of suppliers and search for;

Site:yelp.com intitle: “doctors”

Site:yelp.com intitle: “health markets”

Site:yelp.com intitle: “hospitals”

And visit their sites, and go through them thoroughly.

With this, you will get to know which nap citations are there on which you can get listed according to your niche.

2. Use HARO ( Help A Reporter Out)

It is free to use, which connects journalists with the sources.

This process includes

1. Signing Up

2. You get daily email alerts with questions from journalists.

3. You answer that question or a given quote.

4. If the journalist finds your answer good, you usually get cited in their article.

Though it is a time-consuming process, the result is way better. As you get you can get high-quality citations and links.

Read More: Learn HARO – Link Building Strategy to Get High DA Backlinks & Media Mentions

3. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer

Since, most unstructured website use links of many companies, you can grab this opportunity to have look at your competitor’s backlinks.

Just open the Ahref Site Explorer tool,

Enter the domain URL of your competitors. In the report shown below,  make a filter for “ Do Follow” links.

By looking at the image, you can easily have an eye on the backlinks of your competitors.

What Defines A Strong Local Citation?

Citation management is not only just putting your business out there on any website or directory.

To really make the most out of your business, you have to make sure to have proper Citations SEO.

Here are a few factors to keep in mind for a strong Citations SEO,

NAP Consistency

Make sure, nap citations which include the name, address, and phone number of your business should be the same on each directory.

Having a consistent NAP listing can be a factor affecting your business rankings.

Take Advantage Of All Available Fields

If a listing allows you to add images, logos, or email addresses, you should definitely do it.

The more information, the more will be trusted by any user for your business.

Business Category

The most relative example is Google My Business citations allow you to select secondary categories. 

This can boost your rankings on secondary keywords.

Quantity And Quality Of Directories

You must have your business listed in as many directories as possible. 

This means listing your business on well-known directories will tell Google how much active you are and surely make your business rank higher.

Also, with the number of citations, 

It is important to make sure about the quality of each directory in which you want to get listed.

The directories you choose to list your business should be trustworthy and authoritative.

Positive Reviews

A local business website with positive reviews significantly boosts its rankings, as good reviews are important GSC SEO factors.

Website Link

Sometimes, many businesses just link to their homepage, but instead of this go for an approach to link to the landing page. 

This reduces the number of steps for users to directly move to the desired information.

Ready To Create Citations?

Here‘s A Gift I Got For You…

A list of 500+ Local Business Citation Sites which will help you get a kickstart to your local business for sure! So have a try on them.

All in All:

Through this blog,

I hope you must have got to know everything about Citations SEO is that,

Citation building plays a vital role in a comprehensive GSC SEO strategy for local businesses.

Also, you must not only understand how to craft websites for directories and Google but, you should also look for the most important sites where you should list your business.

And later, effectively monitor their performance and make suitable changes.

Now that you the basics of SEO citation building, it is time to try it out.

I would love to help you with my services to build your website on online citation sites and track the growth from this.