What is Citation Building? | Vicinus.ai
Building your local citations is a fundamental part of increasing your local SEO (search engine optimisation). Citation building is one of the first steps that you should take in order for your business to rank in local search results and claim more local search real estate.
However, before you start citation building, it is best to do a bit of research on which citations would be best for your business. Below is an article outlining all the basics of what citation building is and how it can help your local SEO too.
What is Citation Building?
For online marketing, citations are any mention of your business name, address, phone number or website online. This is also known as NAP (or NAP+W) data.
However, citations can also have a wide variety of other data involved too. Some different types of information in citations are:
- Company name
- Address of your business
- Phone number
- Opening hours (this includes temporary hours)
- Products or services
- Images (of products and your business)
- Videos
- Social media links (these are specifically linked to your business pages)
David Mihm suggests that:
‘In the Local algorithm, links can still bring direct traffic from the people who click on them. But the difference is that these ‘links’ aren’t always links; sometimes they’re just an address and phone number associated with a particular business! In the Local algorithm, these references aren’t necessarily a ‘vote’ for a particular business, but they serve to validate that business exists at a particular location, and in that sense, they make a business more relevant for a particular search.’
As part of building citations for over a decade now links to your website and NAP data are a great way to increase your local SEO.
Where Should I Mention My NAP Data for Citation Building?
Mentions of your business NAP data can occur all over the internet. Some of these places are:
- Business Directories
- Reviews sites (Yelp etc.)
- Local media (newspapers etc.)
- Social Media pages
- Google My Business
- & more
What Types of Citations Are There?
There are two different types of citation. These are known as structured and unstructured citations.
Unstructured Citations
These are citations that don’t follow a listing format (such as NAP). This means that unstructured citations can be spread across information over the internet. For example, when your company name, address, or phone number is mentioned in an article, local newspaper, or even a blog.
Structured Citations
These are citations that relate to specifics such as business names and phone numbers. These are usually citations on Facebook Pages, Yellow Pages, or other types of structured listings.
How Can I Control Citation Building?
If you have already created citations and are finding it difficult to control all of your listings, Vicinus can help you with this.
Vicinus is an AI-powered hyperlocal marketing tool that will enhance your local presence online.
The Vicinus platform features real-time management and creation of business listings across multiple platforms, insights into performance, building and monitoring online reputation, and more.
For full local optimisation, Vicinus also assists in creating SEO-friendly location pages for each of your business locations.
How Do I Start Citation Building?
Staring out with citation building can seem like a massive task. However, following this article is the best way to build up local citations when starting out. For example, within the first 2 months of opening your business, you should be creating at least 20-50 citations in order to be found in local search results.
Creating Citations Online
Building citations is a great addition to your local SEO strategy, however, it can be quite a time-consuming process.
Ensuring that your NAP data is consistent throughout all of your business listings is essential as it will help search engine crawlers identify your website easier.
Using Data Aggregators for Citation Building
Utilising data aggregators in building your citations helps the efficiency of citation building. The four main data aggregators are Factual, Foursquare (since Acxiom retired its directory in December 2019), Neustar Localeze, and Infogroup.
Myles Anderson suggests that:
How Can I Optimise My Citation Building?
There are a few things you can do in order to optimise your citations to the highest degree.
Quality
Ensuring that your citations are high-quality will help aid your local SEO efforts. For example, making sure that the citations you are creating are relevant to your industry is essential as well as making sure that duplicate listings are removed.
Vicinus can help remove duplicate listings. This is because our AI-powered hyperlocal marketing tool works to suppress and remove duplicate business listings to avoid customer confusion.
The best quality citations are industry associations, local business groups, and local news sites.
Competitor Analysis to Find New Opportunities
Finding out where your competitors are located online is a great way of finding out which websites are giving your competitors the edge.
Why Should I Build Citations for My Local Business?
Citation building is critical to deploying a well-rounded local SEO strategy. Although citations alone won’t make a difference, combining them with various other local SEO techniques (keyword research, content updates, social media links etc.) will help your business get found online.
As various structured citations are on high-ranking sites such as Yelp or Yellow Pages helps your business appear in prominent local search results. This helps place your business in higher results when potential customers search for your local business online.
How can Vicinus Help My Citations Get Found Online?
Vicinus supports the management of business listings online from one central platform.
Controlling and keeping track of all consumer-facing information ensures businesses appear in local and “near me” searches.
For more information, please contact us below!
