Setting aside SEO for a moment, there’s something specific about the buyer’s journey that’s well worth looking at: during their initial research phase, consumers will frequently use the local search citations they find within business listings to find the products and services they are looking for. With that said, the value of citations for your rankings and online visibility isn’t the only factor at play, here. It is also imperative that you work to list your business in the places where people are doing the most looking.
These aren’t quite the ranking powerhouse they used to be, but citation signals can pack a serious punch when it comes to your local pack and organic rankings. Search engines put a lot of trust in key online directories when it comes to aggregating accurate information for their SERPs. If this data is consistent and its curators keep it accurate across multiple channels, the search engines in question will prioritize it more often than not.
Directories account for a large number of organic search results when applied to local business site optimization. Local click studies have shown, time and again, that most more on the whole first page (including PPC) go to these business directories than anything else, when users search for local businesses in specific service categories. And users click through because, a lot of the time, they tend to trust lists of businesses more than any other possible resource.
It’s no secret getting links to your site from a trusted or authoritative website can help to propel your SEO to new heights. It’s part of what makes citations so useful and has really become standard practice among many SEO teams. With nearly every business listing directory containing a ‘Website URL’ field and some even displaying a few ‘dofollow’ links, search engines have more than ever to work with in the quest to pass along that all-important link equity and boost your SEO.
Obviously, one of the most important parts of any good marketing plan is being able to get a company’s brand to a position of prominence. Online reputation management and positive reviews are central to this process, making them a central pillar in many SEO plans. Keep delivering outstanding customer service, and the added business listing benefits of this positive coverage can and will benefit your digital brand. If nothing else, these review signals are set to continue growing as time passes.
So far, we’ve gone over how accurate citations can make a big difference to your rankings. The opposite also applies, here, in the event you don’t keep up to date. Remember, the major search engines will regularly crawl these sites with the goal of building an accurate picture of your business. So what happens when they find that the names and addresses are all inconsistent? They struggle to understand your business and assume you’re not on-the-level, which leads directly to them penalizing them in their SERP position. Single-location businesses need to updating their citations whenever their important information changes. Locations, names, and contact numbers can go overlooked if you change them, but they are very important to stay on top of.
Studies show around 80% of consumers struggle to trust local businesses when they interact with their online profiles and discover incorrect and inconsistent contact details. As with any relationship, developing trust with a business is the difficult part. Get it wrong in the beginning, and you might never recover.
Now that we’ve covered the reasons and revelations behind building your local business citations, maybe it’s time we put the “how” of this whole process under the microscope. Essentially, there are three primary approaches when it comes to integrating local citation:
With so many citation sites available and many of them free, to boot, it can be difficult to assess the value of each. If you’re wondering how many citations, on average, are needed by agencies in your industry, or the real impact of citations on your local rankings, make sure to check out some of our other comprehensive SEO blog topics, today, to tap into the wealth of knowledge we have on tap.
Also Read: List of Local Directories for Citations
Web Daytona has been expertly handling the creation and updating of local SEO citations for local businesses, multi-location businesses, and agencies for nearly a decade. Our team of citation builders is solely dedicated to manually updating or cleaning up listings, meaning that accuracy is high and speed is unrivaled in the industry. Not only do our citation-building services and Citation Tracking tool submit your website, manually, but we have the resources to actually show you the citations your competitors have, comparing them to your citations for better results and a more complete online presence.
Find out more about Web Daytona’s Citation Tracking tool
With the coupling of building and monitoring citations with Web Daytona, our clients can be fully confident that their all-important citations are growing and bringing in the traffic and visibility they need from them. Visit us, today, for more on our extensive SEO services.