If you desire to lead local SEO, you need to nail the local Citation strategy as well. Local citation is one of the most important, yet underrated ways to improve your website rankings and win the SEO game.

Local Citations make Google believe that your business is authentic and hence, play an important role when it comes to trusting the same and ranking it on search results. Let’s dive deep into local citation and the ways to use it to rank your business.

What are Local Citations?

In simple words, a local citation is an online reference to your business. This reference includes everything, business name, contact details, your website address, etc.

Google algorithm considers your NAP citations as a signal of authenticity you are delivering and hence, ranks your platform accordingly.

Image Source: Google

Types of Local Citations

To win the SEO citation race, you must have an idea of all sorts of local citations. It gives you a platform where you can strategize your local citation campaign efficiently. Let’s have a glance at them below.

Structured Citation

A structured citation is a type of local citation that lists your phone number, name, address, and website address as a business. Ever seen those details on social media profiles of business pages? Well, those are examples of structured citations. As the name implies, structured business citation follows the same pattern of displaying data.

Unstructured Citation

You might have seen those contextual mentions of businesses in blogs, articles, or even in support forums. This mention is termed unstructured citation. There’s no fixed pattern in unstructured citation. However, it primarily covers all the details about the business.

Importance of Local Citation

So, what makes the local citation in SEO so important? How does it lay a strong foundation for the success of your SEO strategy? Let’s check out the answers.

To Boost Your Local SEO

To yield desired results with the bigger picture, it’s necessary to win a smaller picture first. Yes, as a business, your goal might be to lead international SEO. However, to do so, you need to win local SEO first. And leading it isn’t a cakewalk at all.

Local citation is a factor here that makes the entire process easy and smooth for you. Local citations include everything about your business, which does a major favor to the online visibility of your business, and hence, helps your local SEO considerably.

Hence, if you are striving to improve your local visibility, you can incorporate local search citations into your SEO strategy.

To Make Your Business Discoverable

Yes, your focus is Google, but how many percent of people would actually get a reference to your business from this platform? Well, the fact is that a major chunk of your audience would come to know about your business from the directories and Yellow Pages.

To get a clearer idea about this, just type a keyword in Google, and see which pages display the search results. The majority of them would be from the Yellow Pages and other local directories.

How Do You Build Your Local Citations?

With SEO citations, quality wins over quantity, any day. Thus, rather than focusing on every site you come across, make sure to extract sites that are actually relevant and trusted.

Basically, building your local citations would take a four-step process.

1. Getting listed on data aggregators
2. Submit to other relevant and popular domains
3. Submit to other core sites
4. Shifting the focus a bit to unstructured citation

Getting Listed on Data Aggregators

Firstly, what is a data aggregator? Data aggregation simply means collecting the data. Now, if you submit your NAP citations to directories, the chances of gaps in data submission and collection are always there. This is where data aggregators come in handy.

Data aggregators collect your NAP citation and submit the same to a large number of directories, ensuring that there are no gaps in data submission and collection.

The chances of you getting a large number of local citations are way more when you submit your data to data aggregators rather than submitting it directly to the directories.

Some popular and the most data aggregator companies & tools are:

1. MX
2. Stata
3. MongoDB
4. 3iDataScraping

Data aggregation would ensure that your data isn’t only collected, but also processed in an effective way and submitted accordingly.

Image Source: Google

Submit to Other Relevant & Popular Domains

Now, you need to do some research, figure out the giants of your domain, and submit your business citation to these domains. Some examples are Booking.com if you are into the travel domain, zillow.com if you are in real estate, and so on.

Here, try to choose a unit that’s close to your business. Submitting to other relevant & popular domains is an amazing opportunity to gain some local citations and make sure to grab it.

Submit to Core Sites

Submitting to data aggregators or directories is effective but never enough, specifically, if your domain competition is high. Hence, you need to find popular sites in your location and submit your local search citations to these sites.

Your location would play a major role here. Make sure to consider your location before you select sites to submit your NAP citations.

Some popular sites all over the world are:

1. Facebook
2. Google
3. Yelp
4. Apple

Well, these are just some sites where you can submit your data. The list is long and there are plenty of options where you can submit your site data. Make sure to submit your data only to the sites that are actually popular, trusted, and worth submitting.

Image Source: Google

Shift Your Focus a Bit to Unstructured Citation

Once you have worked enough on structured citation, now is the time to focus a bit on unstructured citation. Unstructured citations come with a different power altogether and can actually do a major favor to your local SEO campaign.

Unstructured citations are way harder and require more effort as compared to structured citations. Here, you need to write a brief about your business and be apt with it.

Then, you need to find relevant sources where you can post it. You need to discuss factors like backlink exchange, guest posting, etc. and make sure that you submit your brief with local citations correctly.

How Do You Find Opportunities for Unstructured Citations?

This is a common confusion website owners go through. To answer that, some of the most reliable ways to do so are:

1. Using Google to Find Supplier Pages: Well, most of the sites have supplier pages. You can extract them and use them as your opportunity to get some local citations. Just explore the website a bit, and you will find the list of suppliers on the site itself.
2. Use Tools like Ahref & SEMrush: People usually think of tools like Ahref & SEMrush as just keyword explore options. However, that’s much more than that. You can use these tools to explore opportunities for local citations.
   
   These tools not only present you with exploring the local citation opportunity but also get information like the DA, Ahref rankings, etc. These tools allow you to study the domains well and hence help you decide if you really wish to submit the site to the domain.

Ways to Get Your Local Citations Listed

There are 3 ways to get local citations listed. Let’s understand them below.

1. Manual Submission by Yourself: This is a time-consuming way as you enter all the information about your business into the site by yourself. However, this is one of the most reliable ways to ensure that the information submitted is correct and accurate as you do it all by yourself.

2. Manual Submission Where Someone Else Does it For You: If you are a busy bee, you can pay someone else to submit your NAP citations to the sites. You can expect that accuracy will be maintained. However, make sure to oversee things so that there are no gaps in data submission by any means.

3. Submission Using Aggregators: Now, you already know what an aggregator is. You can select a reliable aggregator to collect your data and distribute the same to different sites. The tool will manage everything for you here, hence, saving you a lot of time and effort.

Final Thoughts

With local citation, consistency is the key. It’s necessary to be consistent and accurate with the information you provide along with ensuring that you select the correct sites to submit your NAP citations.

Be sure to provide as much information as you can when you submit your local citation as it’s a must to yield the desired and quick results with local citation.

Rest, if you still have any doubts about local citations, or if you are looking for any professional assistance with local SEO services, you can count on our experts to help you out. We ensure that your business gets listed in the most trusted directories and hence, you get the desired results in a quick way.

To connect with our SEO experts, contact us at +91 836-844-7355.

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