First, what are citations? Well, citations are mentions, references, or listings of the name, address, or contact number of your business on other websites. Citations doesn’t necessarily need backlinks; as long as your brand is mentioned you can call that citation. You can see a lot of citations to many website directories like yellowpages.com, whitepages.com and many more. Later I’ll give some list of popular sites that you might want to list your businesses in.
Citations are very important to small businesses with or without websites to boost their popularity. For those who have websites, citations can cause them to have good rankings for search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. When finding businesses related to their needs, people will more or less rely on the Internet for easy browsing. Imagine if you were a business owner who wants to supply your products or services to customer Online? Wouldn’t citations be a great opportunity for your business to gain more and more clients?
Where to get citations for Local SEO?
Before I list some websites to get citations, I would like to discuss about Google’s very own Google Places. Google Places was described by many as a quick primer for small businesses. Every manager starting their business might want to have Google Places. Google Places is like a virtual storefront of all businesses participating on the web. It is where you can find complete details of citation for a business like the organization’s name, country, street address, main phone contact, website, description, business category, and some location settings. Google places also allows you to upload images and videos about your business.
Note that it is very important to complete all of the citations with detailed information. Just like for the street address, it is imperative that you provide the complete street address of your business. For example, if you have listed there St., you should change that and make it Street. Another important detail is the description. When writing a description of your website in Google Places, you should describe your business accurately by answering questions like what services your company provides and where are you providing those services. Keep in mind that you should always give a detailed and relevant information to make a good impression to search engines like Google.
For now, I have listed some of sites where you can get a citations:
- Yelp
- Super Pages
- Yellow Pages
- White Pages
- Yahoo Local
- Kudzo
- Manta
- Yellow Bot
- Insider Pages
Tips on how to find more citation opportunities
- You can search using these keywords : City + Directory or City + Business Listings and Industry + Directory or Industry + Business Listings. For example, Brisbane Directory or Makati Business Listings.
- Do a competitive research about your competitor’s citations. You can do it by searching for their business name and phone number in quotation mark. For example, “John Paul Bakeshop” “611-7435”.
- Use the famous Whitespark’s Local Citation Finding Tool. They offer a limited free services of their tool but if you were really serious of finding more citations for your business, you can avail their services for a price.
- Create your business an account to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in, and last but not the least Google+. They provide citations for your business and it is worth doing for.
Start building citations now to boost your business popularity and to improve your rankings on Local SEO!
Article written by Mr. Radney Miranda
About the Author
Marvin Ortiz is a digital marketing and internet marketing consultant for businesses worldwide. He is the founder and managing director of DigitalMoz Onine Marketing in the Philippines that endeavors to help businesses be found and get more sales from the internet.
