Written by: Ryan Walsh
Local SEO
You might be at this current time be trying to really work hard and improve your local seo as you really need your business to start increasing the number of sales you make.
Sales might have started to lag recently, and you started to ask friends, who also own businesses, over a pint, you might ask them how they improve their local seo?
A lot of these business owners might have come back and said, “you need to build business citations”. However, you might not know what they are, how to build them and also where to obtain the citations- but do not worry we are here to help.
Within this article we are going to talk about:
– What exactly are business citations?
– What do business citations look like?
How many business citations do need?
Why local business citations need to be consistent?
How business citations can really help to give your local seo a boost and help you to generate more sales locally.
Us seo consultants, often have two-way two caps, that’s one for completing national seo for a client, and one for when we are working on improving a business’s local seo. That’s because there are two very different types of optimising a website.
One business might have thousand employees across the country, so they need national seo and for their business to appear on Google for keywords that don’t mention a town, village or city. This is very different from local seo, where its all about getting a company to rank for local keywords, such as:
– Electricians near me
– Electricians in “city name”
– Google recommend some local electricians
In matter-of-fact Google’s algorithm works differently when deciding to place a business in the local business results or nationally.
Different ranking factors are the focus on improving, whether you the agency is working on national or local seo.
For example, with national search engine optimisation, there is a lot of focus building backlinks for example.
We have local search engine optimisation it’s more to do with building business citations.
So, what exactly are local citations and why they important?
Well, like with a lot of things to do with search engine optimisation, when you actually explain what this term means is actually quite simple.
Local citations and mere mentions of your businesses “NAP information”, which stands for name of your business, the address of your business, and the phone number of your business.
Key information, that your customers will want to know. When you start to have this listed on business citation websites, such as Google My Business and all NAP information is consistent, while this acts as a reinforcing factor to reinforce the point that your business is actually base on a certain street.
So, when Google needs to recommend say a local hairdressing salon that specialises in hair highlights, they will have confidence that that businesses based there, because it might have 100 consistent business citations to say that the business has a premises there.
What are the different type of business citations?
Well there are many different places where you can build a business citation, for example on social media pages, for example on a Facebook business page, plus, these are completely free to create.
There are also specialist websites which act as a directory, which often allow you to generate a free citation, for example on Yelp.co.uk.
There are also sometimes directories which specialise in a particular industry, for example a marketing company website, might list marketing companies which it approves of in the local area.
The main reasons why we would recommend building local citations, is because it gives Google’s algorithm a very good understanding of where your business is based, so your address, your phone number for example.
What exactly does a business citation look like?
A business citation can simple plaintext, and the business citation, just needs to state your company’s name, address and phone number. Us seo consultants call this the NAP information.
There’s no coding that is needed, it simply a mention of this NAP information about your business that sufficient to start improving your local seo.
It might be beneficial if there’s a backlink which leads to your company website, but this is not necessary Google is clever enough to crawl and index that page, and note that has NAP information about your business, it doesn’t need a backlink to know that that NAP information is to do with your business.
It’s important for consistency, so a structured citation simply state your businesses name, the company address, and the company phone number, this then appears on for example Google Business Profile, yell could also appear on Thomson local as well.
So, what exactly is an unstructured citation?
Unstructured Citations
An unstructured citation is arguably much less valuable than a structured citation, it’s simply a mention of your businesses key information, that NAP information, such as business name, its phone number or perhaps it’s address, but it might be the case that one of these are mentioned and not all of them.
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What type of business citation should we be building?
We would the best are from really respected website, so for example let’s say that you run a law firm, and your business has a special accreditation, which shows your knowledge of being a family lawyer for example.
That company that provides the accreditation to your law firm, might only have awarded that accreditation to less say seven businesses in your area, and they might recommend your business on their own website, stating your businesses name, address and phone number (NAP formation).
This is brilliant for two reasons, it’s a structured citation, but more than that, it’s from relevant and respected website to do with your solicitor’s practice.
Make sure you keep it consistent
Consistent Data
It’s important that when you’re writing businesses NAP information, and all of the business citations are consistent, as this will tell Google, your business is based at that address, and that the phone number is correct, and the businesses name.
If you do change any of the NAP information, it’s important to update all of your business citations
If you don’t, then this could mean that your telling Google, for example that your business is based in one address, and on another citation, it might list your old address, this can confuse the algorithm.
So do make sure that you keep your business citations up-to-date
How many business citations do I need?
There’s no number that you need to reach, to really give your seo a huge advantage, what is far better is to look at the high-quality websites such as Google Business Profile, Yellow Pages, and perhaps another directory such as Thomson local and to get your business information, that is NAP information on these websites and keep the information up-to-date.
How do you go about building a business citation?
Building a business citation is actually a piece of cake, however we would strongly recommend this, that you have a plain text notepad document, and you simply write into that your companies Nap information, that’s name, address and phone number in there.
Why do we recommend that?
Well quite simply put, what you are able to do is to simply copy and paste that information, and you might think well why is that needed?
Well, it can help you save time, it can also make sure that all of the information is consistent, because you might get tired, and you might make a typo if you were to manually type every business citation, which might cause the business citations to be conflicting, if they are not consistent.
For example, you might miss a digit on your phone number, that’s very easy to do, however if you’re copying and pasting the you’re less likely to make mistakes.
