CITATIONS: A Most Important Part of Local Search Optimisation

Thursday 27 August 2009

One of the best ways to improve your Local Search Ranking is by splashing citations for your business around the Internet.

What is a Citation?
In the context of Local Search Marketing, a citation is simply your business details (name, address, telephone number etc.) displayed on another website. Google especially, gives a lot of weight to any citations it finds. If you have some knowledge of organic search engine optimisation, you'll understand the importance of backlinks - citations are analogous to backlinks in Local SEO.

Getting Citations
Although you can get citations from any website on the Internet, you should be aiming for those that rank well in search engines - a citation on Auntie Maud's blog won't make much difference to your ranking whereas a citation on your industry body's website will. You are aiming for quality over quantity and websites associated with your industry are even better. A quick email or phone call to the website owner is all you need.

As a sidenote, if your business has a website, make sure your contact details are displayed on every page, perhaps in the footer or sidebar. In effect this is citing yourself but it really does help your rankings.

Finally, the best source of citations are online business directories such as Yell.com, TouchLocal and BView. Most allow you to submit your details for free. The only difficulty is sorting the wheat from the chaff. There are thousands of directories and most of them won't really improve your rankings very much, so choosing which ones to spend time on can be a little overwhelming. I will write a post in the near future about the best directories to submit your details to but in the meantime, the three listed above are a good start.

2 comments:

Alistair McIvor said...

I've done some work recently on building the number of citations for a company I work for.

It sounds obvious but one thing I would advise is that once you've added your company details to TouchLocal, Bview etc, you then ensure that the search engines promptly index (or re-index) the page where your company is listed.

Perhaps link to that page from your home page to help the process along. Otherwise it may be months until you see the beneficial results of getting more citations.

Local Search Advertising said...

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