Yes, citations still matter for local SEO.
Wow, that was easy! Blog post over, everyone can head home now.
…
OK, you’re right, we should dive a bit deeper! What exactly are citations, why do they matter, and how do you build them for your local business?
What are citations in SEO?
Citations are online listings of your business information that include your business’s name, address, and phone number (commonly referred to as NAP). Ideally, a citation will also include a backlink to your website and fields for other information like your logo, business description, hours, social media links, and more.
Citation websites come in many different forms, from topical to local to general. We’ll explore specific examples of citation websites in the “How to build citations” section below.
Why do citations matter, and how do they work?
Simply put, citations matter because they move the needle. This foundational study by Uberall shows that every visibility and conversion metric they analyzed was improved by citation building. If that’s not enough to convince you that it’s worth the time and effort to create citations for your business, let’s take a look at how and why they work.
Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP)
Ask any local SEO professional which ranking factors matter most, and NAP will almost certainly come up. Getting your business’s name, address, and phone number consistently and accurately distributed across the web sends a signal to search engines that your brand is a real-world entity.
This is also important for your brand outside of SEO considerations. You want potential customers to know exactly what your business name is, what your physical address is, and what your phone number is no matter where they find you on the web. If you’re “A-1 Plumbing,” you don’t want to get confused with your competitor “A1 HVAC & Plumbing”!
Barnacle SEO
The idea behind barnacle SEO is to get your brand attached to other sites that rank well for your target keywords. More often than not, barnacle SEO is achieved through citation building. For example, ranking highly on the Yelp page for ‘plumber near me’ in your location can lead to referral traffic from customers who go to Yelp first.
If you want to learn even more about the topic, we have an entire blog post dedicated to barnacle SEO!
Citations Build Backlinks
Similar to NAP consistency, “quality backlinks” will almost certainly come up as an answer when you ask an SEO professional about what ranking factors are important. Many citation websites come with direct backlinks to your website. Citations are not necessarily the highest quality source of backlinks, and some of those links may be nofollow (an HTML tag on a link that tells search engines to “not associate your site with, or [follow] the linked page from, your site”) or sent through a 301 redirect (rather than a direct link to your site, the link passes through a redirect, diminishing its SEO value). Even with these potential caveats, citation links are still very much worth building.
Reputation Management
The more commonly known sites like Google and Yelp hold a lot of weight in developing a customer’s opinion of your brand. Establishing yourself on citation websites that allow customers to leave reviews will help build your brand’s reputation (assuming you can earn some positive reviews).
How to build citations for your local business
We have an in-depth guide on how to find competitor citations and build them in a previous blog post, but let’s take a quick look at building citations.
In most cases, building a citation is as easy as creating an account, filling out your business information, adding a logo and maybe some photos, and submitting the listing. The higher-quality citations might require you to receive a phone call or text message for verification, and others might only require you to sign up with an email address that matches your business’s domain name.
Remember while you’re creating citations: NAP consistency is key! If you’re going to go through the trouble of creating citations across multiple websites, make sure you’re using the exact same name, physical address, and phone number. Call tracking tools can make NAP consistency tricky for your website, so make sure to use your primary phone number while building citations.
Common Citation Websites
General: These online business directories are open to any local business. Anyone with a physical location should aim to build a citation on these websites:
- Google Business Profile, Bing Maps, Apple Maps, Yelp, Foursquare, Yellowpages, etc.
- Some social media sites (like Facebook and Nextdoor) could be considered on this list as well.
Topical: Some citation sites are limited to a specific type of business.
- Home services businesses have Angi, Porch, Thumbtack, etc.
- Lawyers have Avvo, Nolo, Lawyer.com, etc.
- The medical field has ZocDoc, Healthgrades, Vitals, etc.
Local: Locally focused citation sites are rare, but they do exist (especially in bigger cities). However, many of the local citation websites you’ll find are too low quality to be worth pursuing. It takes time and practice to develop a sense of what can be considered a high- or low-quality directory. A good place to start is third-party SEO tools like Moz Domain Analysis, which scores a website’s Domain Authority out of 100 and provides a Spam Score to estimate whether or not a website is spammy.
Local SEO is always changing, but citations still matter
Maybe it feels too easy and simple that creating a business listing in an online directory would have an impact on your local search rankings, but getting it done correctly really can make a difference. If you have the time to set them up and the ability to answer phone verification calls when needed, there’s no reason to not create free citations for your business and improve your online presence.
