The Importance of Citations in Local SEO
In this age of fierce competition, companies are looking at everything which can help them pull ahead of the competition. While many of the companies ignore citations, they can help you and your business a lot, bringing in more customers. Let’s just take a look at citations and how they can help you.
What is a citation?
A citation is any mention of you or your business on the Internet, in any form. It can be:
- Just the name of your organization.
- The name and the phone number of your organization.
- The name, address, phone number and the link to your organization’s website.
Even the phone number alone can work as a citation. A citation including all of the information is known as a complete citation, anything missing is a partial citation. For a citation to contribute to the success of your local SEO strategy, it is very important that the citation exactly matches your name, address and phone number on your website. The format doesn’t matter here, but picking a format and being consistent is important.
Significance of citations
Citations are one of the primary factors, Google considers when deciding on the order of business ranking in local searches. To Google, it is logical that a business which is mentioned more on the Internet, deserves a better ranking, than one’s who aren’t mentioned at all. Google employs these citations to verify the accuracy of the details in the local listings as well, as these listings usually carry out of date information. If the name, address, and phone numbers are verified from there, Google feels more confident showing this information to the searches. Last but not the least, citations increase awareness about your business and help more people reach you online. The more citations you get the higher chance of people who see it will contact you.
Quality vs Quantity
We’ve compiled an article about this very topic, but to summarize here, it’s important to have both. If you have quantity without quality, then most likely you’ll be far behind in the valuable search engine positions. If you have quality without quantity, again, you may be left behind by your competition. The volume depends on your competitors. The quality depends on a number of factors, almost all of which are within your control. Take care of the quality factors first, then move on to the volume.