By Roland
When it comes to local SEO services, citations are among the most important aspects that need utmost care while performing them. The citations play a significant role in improving your local business’ visibility among the audience and it drives more sales & traffic to your company.
If a business optimizes its citations in the right manner, it can bring a lot of benefits to them. But on the flip side, if the information present on these citations is not accurate or different from one another, it can create trouble for your local SEO strategies. So in this article, we will have a look at what exactly are the citations and what are the best practices for them.
Citation: What exactly are they?
You can understand the citations as the online reference to your business’ contact details and other important information. The citations generally have your business name, phone number, address, and other information like opening hours, services, etc. Many people do refer to these citations as business listings that help people reach companies faster. These citations need only a limited amount of information about your company and they bring in a wide range of benefits.
The benefit of these citations is that it becomes easier for customers to search for your business as they will get a lot of results regarding your company.
Different platforms for citations that help in local SEO
There are more than hundreds of platforms available online where you can list your site and help customers to find you easily. As registering on all of them is not possible and it’s not worth the time, it’s easier to get listed on the top citation platforms. Regardless of your business and industry, below are the platforms on which you should list your business as they have an active user base of billions:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Bing
All the above platforms are free and you only need basic business details to get listed on these platforms. By registering your brand on these citation sites, it helps you boost your local SEO. This is because these types of citations are major social signals for search engines including Google and Bing. Citations are very similar to link building but the purpose is very different from each other.
Why these citations are important for boosting local SEO:
Once you create accurate citations on different platforms, this not only improves your local visibility but also brings in more customers to your business. Below are some of the most important benefits of it:
It gives local ranking a boost:
Citations are a major ranking factor that search engines consider and this is because more citations show that your business is legitimate. And, when customers are also interacting with your citations, then it generates major social signals. So, if you just started a business online, it is the first thing that you should do to boost your local SEO rankings. This is the best and free way to get higher visibility in the competitive business domain.
You appear in multiple search results:
One of the best advantages of having listed on popular platforms is that your chances of appearing on multiple search results improve. There will be many instances that multiple pages of your site will rank for a single term just because of the citation done correctly.
Good source of relevant traffic:
If you are looking to generate additional traffic for your business then there is nothing better than listing your sites on multiple platforms. This will help you generate significant traffic that will be relevant to your business. It is because only interested people will click on your business’ link as they are planning to get your services or products from you.
How to pick the right ones for your business
After knowing the benefits of citations, it is also important to understand which citation platforms are best for you and which are not. As there are no such rules to pick the citation sites as all have good traffic on their platforms. But, it’s good to start with those citation platforms that are relevant to your business and can bring more benefits to your business.
Once you cover all the important platforms related to your industry, you can try other popular platforms that are not directly linked to your business but can bring potential traffic to your site. Before you list your business, make sure you are entering consistent details on all the platforms so that it will not create confusion. Otherwise, it will be difficult to pick the right one for both the search engines and the customers. So, from the above information, it’s pretty much clear that why citations are important for local SEO and how they can drive more traffic to your business. If you don’t have an in-house team, then you can hire a professional SEO Reseller to get everything done for you.
Source: https://digitalscrapz.com/business/local-seo-citations-the-definitive-guide-for-beginners/
