Finding & Building Citations Like Never Before
Citation building continues to be one of the most important factors affecting rankings in local search.
Citation building continues to be one of the most important factors affecting rankings in local search.
However, the approach to building citations has evolved over the past few years, and quality approach has overtaken quantity. The following article talks about the best way to find and build citations to avoid penalties. Read on to know.
Citations refer to mentions of your business’ name, address, phone number or website on sites other than your own website. They are built for gaining local visibility. Focusing on building a strong list of citations is very important for businesses, because it improves visibility of the business on the internet as well as helps gain the search engine’s trust in the business’ existence. In fact, building authoritative, high quality citations, is viewed to be a major ranking factor in local search markets.
The importance of Local SEO for businesses, cannot be emphasized on enough. While it’s imperative to ensure that citations are in place, the approach to
local listing optimization has changed. Chasing citations isn’t the right approach to building them anymore. Instead, citation building should be in a way that helps viewers be guided to your website.
The best approach to finding and building citations
It isn’t just important to build citations but also ensure they are built with the accurate details. You may have a list of citations already, but if the your NAP isn’t consistent throughout your citations, you only create confusion in a potential customer’s mind. So, here are a few quick steps to finding and building citations and ensuring it gets your business the visibility it needs.
NAP: To begin with, ensure that your Name, Address and Phone number is accurate and consistent throughout your website. Discrepancies in this fundamental information can rob your business of visibility, where it should show up.
Automated vs. Manual: With NAP in place, you need to begin citation building. Now, you could either consider services of mass publishing sites such as Yext or Yelp, which is paid. Or, you could take a manual approach to citation building, which isn’t going to be easy, but will help you steer clear of automated publishing shortfalls. Should you decide to take the manual route, consider the following 3-step approach:
Make a list of citations that you’d want your business to be listed. You could consider using resources like ROBO FORM, but again, doing it manually is recommended.
Next, build citations correctly. Consider this 3-step approach: Check if the listing already exists. If it does, check if the NAP is accurate and updated. If it doesn’t, build it. Building top citations: There are numerous websites that suggest the top citation sources city-wise and industry-wise, for example, Getlisted. Compile a list of the citations that you’d want your business to be listed in.
Finding the citations used by your top competitors: Now, this can either be done by running a search on Google with your top competitor’s NAP. Alternatively, you can use tools like MOZ Local, Localeze, etc. to find out your top competitor’s citations.
Well, this approach should help you find and build the best citations. However, if that’s too much on your plate, you could consider taking services of expert citation builders. A good one that comes to my mind is SEO Tuners.
Have better citation building suggestions to offer? Share them with me in the comments below.
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