Local citations can help you get found in more places online and boost your local SEO. Learn everything you need to know to build them.
If you are a small business targeting local customers, local SEO can still generate a great and sustainable ROI (and has become simpler and more predictable than other forms of SEO).
That said, an aspect of local SEO that is often misunderstood is local citations. This is because:
And perhaps most importantly: Many small business owners aren’t sure whether they should contract out work on citation building or do it themselves (and if they should do it themselves, how to do it).
In this article, I’ll answer all of these questions and walk through how to build citations yourself.
If you’re not interested in the nitty gritty and just want an answer to “how should I handle citations for my small business” you can skip ahead to the last section where I’ll answer that for you based on budget and how competitive your industry and area are.
A local citation is an online mention of a business. In the context of local SEO, this typically refers to a structured listing on an external website that includes the business name, address, and phone number (NAP).
These are usually listings at any of a variety of sites, most frequently directory-style websites. They come in different flavors such as:
So, let’s say we own a home remodeling business in Oxford, Mississippi. We can get our business listed on general sites like the Yellow Pages:
Chamber of commerce, government or travel directories, or other town/city, county, or state directories:
Or we could find directories focused on construction or resources for homeowners:
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Many local citations that you build will include links to your website, but some will not.
The focus in building citations is not solely to get links, it’s to have your business listed in key directories where legitimate small businesses frequently appear, and in local and industry directories to help signal to Google that your business is noteworthy and trustworthy when it comes to your business focus and location.
That said, building citations will typically lead to an increase in the number of links to your website, as many sites will allow you to include a link.
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NAP consistency refers to the consistency with which your business listings across the web and with major data providers is the same.
If your business has changed names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, etc. you may have inconsistent data in different listings on the web. This can hurt local rankings as it’s a signal to Google that your business may not be reliable and trustworthy.
Building citations generally refers to the practice of creating new local citations for your business which is not the same as updating your existing citations for consistency, but many vendors will simultaneously work on “cleaning up” any NAP inconsistencies (claiming your business profiles places where you may not have known they exist, updating them in instances where you, a vendor, or someone within your company may have created them before a change in business name, phone number, or physical address, etc.), and building out new citations.
I recently came across two different tweets from folks who share a lot of good local SEO information on X (formerly Twitter) with different perspectives on citations.
This case study:
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) September 17, 2024
And then this tweet and reply:
constant citation building is so underrated for maps rankings imo
— Cole | Dental + Local SEO (@AllGasSeo) October 23, 2024
In the first example, the case study did find that citations boosted organic rankings for a landing page, even though Maps rankings weren’t impacted. The responding tweet notes something that I’ve observed myself: Citations do have a direct impact on rankings in some cases.
So like with many SEO questions, the answer here is likely “it depends.”
A few things are true:
In terms of “how many” local citations your business needs, here are some guidelines:
Building local citations is a time-consuming process, but a relatively simple one.
First, you want to start by making sure you have the right information to bring to the citation-building process, namely:
It’s a good idea to keep a spreadsheet handy and add fields that you run across as you’re building citations to your sheet, as they’ll often come up again. For instance, if a site asks you for an alternate phone number, plug what you submit there into your spreadsheet (or, in some cases, if the field is optional, you may want to just leave those blank).
You also want to be able to access the email you’re going to use and to be able to access the phone number you’re giving for verification across these citations.
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Looking for ways to build citations? Follow these steps.
The simplest way to start here is to make sure you have the “major players” and most common citation sources covered first. Start with these:
From there, you can also get to 50+ local citations easily by leveraging lists like this top 50 citations by WhiteSpark, this one by BrightLocal, etc. (I’ll get more into how to evaluate different citations in a minute).
While it’s not a direct citation, by having your data submitted to the major data aggregators you can then have those sites submit your data to multiple additional directories in turn. Here are the largest data aggregators:
If you submitted to these 11 places, you’d be off to a good start, and in some niches in some areas, you may even be ahead of some of your competitors. In even a moderately competitive industry/geography combination, though, all of your competitors will have these citations. How can you get more, impactful citations?
The quality and impact a citation has will vary depending on your industry and geography. There are some ways to gauge likely impact here.
Start by looking at competitors. Think more about your SERP (search engine result page) competitors than your “real life” competitors. The company you think of as your closest competitor may not be the company you’re competing with for real estate in search engine results. When I search for Oxford, MS, home remodeling, I can see the first competitors I want to investigate in the Map pack:
I type in the full name of the company with the geo-modifier to make sure I get the right results and look at the listings showing the highest for the company name:
Here is a second company:
As you go through multiple competitors, you’ll quickly get insights like:
You can use this as an exercise both to help prioritize citations if you have limited time and resources and to find new citation opportunities.
Once you have a sense of which competitor seems to be getting a lot of these types of citations (which you can usually tell just by looking at the search results above) you can then unearth more citation opportunities by going to Google.com and typing in “competitorwebsite.com:”
As you scroll through these results, you can really start to find some gems that may not show up just by searching for the competitor name:
This is a useful tactic as well because it allows you to:
You can also use paid tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to look at the backlinks a competitor has to see which sites are linking to them, and paid local SEO tools like BrightLocal and WhiteSpark offer tools to find citations generally, and to look at competitor citations as well.
If Google doesn’t acknowledge your citations, there’s not really any value in having them. Checking to see if your specific citation is indexed is a good way to determine if the citation has been “counted” by Google.
To manually do this for one citation is pretty simple. Just go to Google and type in site:directory.com/toms-construction-listing. If you see your listing, that means it’s indexed:
If not, then your listing (or a competitor’s listing) likely isn’t indexed:
If you want to check your citations in bulk it’s a little trickier, but you can use some paid tools and services like URL Profiler or IndexCheckr.com.
If you find your URLs aren’t getting indexed, there are a few methods you can use to get them indexed:
A couple of things to be aware of with indexing services:
If you’re in a particularly competitive industry and geography and you want to go beyond the core citations and your direct competitors’ best citations, there are a few ways to expand your citation reach:
As with many tasks in your local business, however, you need to ask yourself the question: Should I be building these local citations myself in the first place?
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Here are your basic choices for building citations if you’re a small business owner:
Things to consider here will be:
Given the fact that citation building can have a significant impact on local SEO results, tends to be time-intensive to execute on your own, and is a relatively low-cost service compared to other marketing activities, it’s often the right choice to outsource. If you do hire an agency or contractor for this task, make sure:
Want help building local citations? Reach out for a demo!
