Do you wish your business to be found locally? Wish to improve the overall local search engine rankings for your website? Local citation building might be the key. Citation building can be referred to as the foundation for any local search engine marketing strategy. In this post, we will help you unravel the importance of local citation building and how you can create a local NYC business listing seamlessly.
Introduction to Citation Building
A local citation could be referred to as the mention of your business locally. It could be the combination of your business address, contact number, company name, postal code, and address of the website. Local citations in SEO tend to be the major factor contributing to the respective local search results for your business.
Local citations for businesses are available in many forms. Some of these include:
Company name
Company name, website, address
Company name, phone number
Company name, address, phone number
Company name, website, phone number, address
Company contact number
The main concept of local citation building for your business is that you are required to specify the general information –what your company name is, its location, contact information, online presence, and so more. However, how do you make it obvious to the search engines that your business appears in the respective local searches? Moreover, why should you ensure the same? While customers might be your topmost business priority, it is important to note that people will be searching for businesses online on the leading search engines.
As per recent study reports, it is estimated that around 88 percent of consumers tend to perform online searches on mobile for products or services. Moreover, 51 percent of such searches tend to have local intent. This is the reason why local citation building becomes even more important for your business.
An Insight into Local Citation Building
Local citations for your business can occur on local business websites, directories, apps, and even on social media platforms. Citations are known to help the online users come across local businesses while also impacting the local search engine rankings of business organizations out there. For ensuring data accuracy, local businesses can look forward to managing multiple citations actively.
As per a study report, it is estimated that local citations along with GMB (Google My Business) could make up around 32 percent of the local ranking factors. Citations serve to be useful for your business as these help in sending out the signals for telling the search engines that the customers can trust your business.
Citation building serves vital for all small local businesses out there that want to be easily found locally in the search engines. Major search engines like Bing & Google are known to make use of information gathered from the respective citations for enlisting your business in the respective search results. Therefore, you can look forward to hiring professional local NYC business listing or citation building services for the best outcomes.
Types of Local Citations
There are different types of local citations that you can consider making use of for your business listing. Here are some:
Important Local Business Data Platforms: Owners as well as marketers of local businesses can look forward to creating citations on a wide range of vital local business data platforms. These platforms are available out there to publish the given data type. Some of the key platforms including Acxiom, Google My Business, Infogroup, and others can help your local business. Important local business listings can also be implemented on leading social media or review websites like Yelp & Facebook.
Geo-Specific or Industry-Specific Platforms: Along with building local business listings on the major data platforms, your business should consider building listings or citations on websites that might be particular to the unique geography or industry. Instances of such platforms are known to include the web portals of professional guilds or associations or the chamber of commerce portals.
The Wider Web: You can also look forward to creating supplementary citations on a wide number of publications like news sites, blogs, government databases, maps, and so more.
Why Do Local Citations for Your Business Matter?
Citations are regarded as vital tools for ensuring the overall success of any business out there. Vital ranking algorithms including that of Yahoo, Bing, and Google are known to rate citations significantly while relying on them towards ensuring that the results obtained from the search pages of the visitors are highly valuable.
When your business information tends to be uniform across some of the most credible online directories, it serves to be an indicator to the respective search engines that your business is legitimate and genuine. When you ensure that your business appears on reputed websites, it helps in creating a notion of authority while establishing trust in your website.
Citations also go by the name as “signals.” Signals are known to help the ranking algorithms get rid of all scam businesses from the respective search results of the end users. Businesses that do not have valid and uniform NAPs are not ignored –the search engines pull them out easily. This is the reason why it is imperative for your business in NYC to be aware of the importance of local NYC business listings and how you can get them in order for avoiding any penalization by the respective search algorithms.
Where to Get Local Citations?
Thankfully, as a business owner, you can come across several places to build a reliable collection of citations for creating extra legitimacy and authority in the respective search engine algorithms. At the same time, it is important to understand where you can source for the given citations before building them. This is because this would help you to achieve improved placement in the respective search engine rankings.
You can look forward to sourcing citations from:
Local Search Engines: Websites including Yelp, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, and others are some of the relevant sources that are utilized by search engines like Bing & Google for verifying the overall legitimacy of the given business. When you have a complete set of accurate business profile in such websites, it will help in boosting the overall confidence that search engines are going to have in the respective NAP.
Niche-specific Local Blogs: Local blogs are known to be highly reliable sources of citations for your business. Moreover, it is also quite simpler to come across your business listing on such blogs or websites. You can perform a quick Google search for your location or city along with the niche as well. This will produce a wide number of local blogs that serve to be the perfect candidates for the respective business listing.
As most blog owners out there are looking out for high-quality content regularly for improving the overall rankings and placement, you can consider setting up a mutually beneficial relationship here. You can get your business listed on such local blogs while they will have some top-quality content for the respective SEO.
Industry-Specific Directories and Websites: The leading search engines like Bing & Google are also known to place great reliance and authority on industry-specific directories and websites. This is because such platforms are known to be associated with a particular city or region. Even when the particular directory or website might not be focused on the given region, when you have the business listed on such a platform, it turns out to be a great way to build citations.
Location of the Listing of Competitors: You can look out for where the competitors are listed when you wish to search for industry-specific local sites, directories, and websites wherein you can list your business as well. At the same time, it is important to avoid listing your business on spam websites during the process.
When you wish to find where the citations of your competitors are listed, you can type the business name of the competitors on Google. By doing so, you can get a proper list of the places wherein the business name has been mentioned. While it might turn out time-consuming, it is still worthwhile in the long run.
Local Business Organizations: Such organizations like the Chamber of Commerce in the given city or location serve to be valuable sources of obtaining legitimate citations. As a matter of fact, these local organizations always tend to welcome local businesses to enlist themselves on the given website. This is because it tends to expose your business to the local community as well as data aggregators like Localeze, Neustar, Infogroup, and others. The respective data aggregators are known to search for while validating relevant business data and distributing data to the respective credible websites.
How to Build Local Citations?
The first thing that you would like to do before building a new local citation for your business is to clean up the previous citations on search engines. To search where your business is listed, you can search for the business name and contact number in double quotations. Once you come across these citations, you can claim the respective business pages while going forward to edit the available information like name, address, contact number, and so on. Make sure that all the information that you are provide are accurate and up-to-date.
Optimizing Listings
You can indeed go for claiming web pages on websites like Google My Business or Yelp. However, you should also aim at optimizing the given listings.
While doing so, you should provide ample information about your business to the customers such that they have a good understanding of your business. You can even consider adding a short description along with relevant photographs.
It is important to remember that most of these websites are known to allow the users to review the businesses online. Therefore, you should keep an eye on the respective customers’ reviews as well. Consider responding to negative reviews while making things appear right for the one who wrote the review.
Building Brand-new Local Business Citations
In case you are looking forward to building brand-new citations, you should start over with the given list of data aggregators are mentioned above. In addition to this, you can search for location-specific or industry-specific directories while also searching for the competitors to analyze the citation sources they are using for listing the respective businesses.
Before you go ahead with putting up the NAP of your local business in NYC on every possible directory in New York’s local listing, it is important to remember that some might turn out more valuable in comparison to others. To top it all, you should always aim for quality instead of quantity with the local NYC citations. Ensure that your business is locally listed on important platforms rather than going for a huge number of citations.
Citation-Building Checklist for Your Business
Here are some important points to consider:
Pick the correct address for your business. You can check with USPS for checking how and exactly what address is listed.
Save the given information on some spreadsheet for minimizing errors while making the process of citation building quite simpler. Therefore, when you need to update the respective listings, you can go ahead with copying & pasting the given information into the specific directory.
Search for your business name in Google for coming across the existing citations.
Start building new local citations in NYC to ensure the best results.
Optimize the listings of your business. Whenever it is possible, it is recommended for you to include business information, photographs, and categories. Always make it a point to check for and respond to customers’ reviews while keeping your listings updated.
Conclusion
When you tend to have a strong citation profile for your local business in NYC, it turns out to be one of the simplest ways for ensuring local SEO. Citations are regarded as important parts of the basics of maximizing local search for your business in the given location. If you are struggling with this aspect of your business, you can consider hiring professional help.
References