Why are Local Citations Important?

Local citations are mentions of your business on different platforms. They are a vital SEO factor. A citation not only influences your website’s ranking in SERPs but also its reputation and popularity. Search engines such as Google and Bing regularly browse the web to validate the data available to them. If they find any inconsistency or an error in your business’s NAP, then it damages your rankings.

Apart from that, it can act as a tie-breaker for the rankings of your website and your competitor’s. That’s’ because it influences 25% of your local search factors. All in all, citations make your business easy to find by both, people and search engines.

Why are Local Citations Important?

Local citations are mentions of your business on different platforms. They are a vital SEO factor.

Tools to Get Citations:

You can use a tool for getting citations. These tools automate and simplify most of the process for you:

Moz’s Local SEO tool:

Moz is the leader in SEO practices. Their software is fast, effective and accurate. With its help, you will be able to find your business citations quickly. The best thing about the Moz Local SEO tool is, you get multiple features and benefits. They offer a free trial but for proper use, you’ll need to get the paid version.

Yext:

Yext generates a report for all the sites and places where your business is listed. They can help you find your business citations in all nooks and corners of the web.

But if you want to modify the citations using this tool, you’ll need to get the paid version. Their reports are great to find and manage all of your citations efficiently.

Whitespark:

Like Yext, Whitespark gives you the list of places where your business is listed as well. It also has a management tool for ease of use. If you pay their premium, you get to search for places where you can mention your business. This is a huge advantage because you’ll not have to conduct a manual search for this task.

BrightLocal:

BrightLocal’s citation tool lets you find all the places where your business is cited. It also, however, gives you the facility to find the citations of your competitors. You can find out where they are cited and get citations on those websites as well. You might also get an idea about the citations in your industry.

Local Websites:

Find websites operating in your area and get in touch with them. You can find them by entering ‘[your area] + blog [or website]’ in the search bar.

You will be surprised to see how many blogs might be present in your area. Depending on their ranking and the amount of content they publish, you can understand how much reputed the platform is. You can get in touch with them and post some guest posts as well. It will give you exposure to their site while increasing your number of backlinks as well.

Third-Party Platforms:

There are many third-party websites on the web such as HotFrog, FourSquare, Yelp, etc. where you can get many business citations. Search engines crawl these platforms regularly and so, you should stay active there and get as many citations as possible.

Business Directories:

Every area has specific business directories. You should get your business cited on these directories too. Make sure that you get your business listed on reputed and spam=free directories.

Search engines crawl them just like the third-party websites, and so, having a citation there will definitely help you in boosting your SEPR ranking.