A lot of marketing consultants here in the Seattle really believe in the power of submitting citations to improve their clients local rankings. While we also submit citations for our clients we do so for other reasons than just improving their rankings on Google.
What other reasons is there for submitting citations?
To get direct traffic from the citation sites of course.
Here’s a good blog post from SEOMoz that does a perfect job explaining this further.
Finding and Building Citations Like an Agency
So you want to rank locally? If you have already worked hard to add a few citations, complete your on-site local optimization, acquire customer reviews, and build some locally relevant links, well, now it’s time to shift your focus. According to David Mihm, citations make-up roughly 25% of the overall local ranking factors.
Why It’s Time to Change Your Thinking…
I’ve mentioned before that it’s time to stop chasing links, and for local SEO it’s time to stop chasing citations! What do I mean by that? If your whole purpose for creating citations is to improve your local rankings, then you are probably relying too much on Google. What would happen if those rankings were to suddenly go away? Instead of viewing the process building your brand in the local ecosystem as a laborious task that needs to get done so that you can rank, then you aren’t seeing the big picture.
Each of the citation sites that you’re trying to get listed on were created with goals far beyond just helping businesses rank for Google’s local results. In most cases, they were created to provide a good customer experience and send potential shoppers to worthy vendors. Each of these sites gets their own traffic, and setting up your business listing on them is another place for potential customers to find you.
Below is a quick example from a fairly low traffic attorney site. In a one month period, they are getting traffic from other websites where their citations also reside. To finish reading Finding and Building Citations Like an Agency click here.
Here’s a great video that goes a bit deeper into what citations are and how they help your business.
