What is Citations and why are these important for SEO?

Posted by Bhuvnesh Aggarwal on January 15th, 2019

Citations are one of the most important factors in local SEO. 

In layman’s language it means getting your business listed on quality websites. It doesn’t require your website to be linked, but it needs your business name and address and business phone number to be listed on quality websites. This Google and other search engines crawls and give relevant importance to your business.

In SEO, citations are referred as “mentions” of your business on other websites and web pages. A local citation is anywhere where the business name, address, and phone number are all together listed. In the Local SEO world, it is commonly known as ‘NAP’.

But citations should come from authoritative websites, because having your business listed on high-quality websites is going to help you more in the search engine rankings than being listed on low-quality websites. Therefore, one of your local SEO strategies should be to first target as many high quality and authoritative websites as you can. Once we start getting citations from these websites, we can gradually expand our reach. It’ll boost your local business with a strong citation profile and that will help you in achieving higher search engine rankings.

Consistent citations are important. Make sure there are no inconsistencies.

Business Name, Business Address and Business Phone Number structure and use it exactly across the web. Do not change it.

For instance, “SEO Service in Chandigarh” and “SEO Company in Chandigarh” is an example of inconsistency. If we are using differentbusiness names, addresses and phone numbers while creating citations then our website’s SEO value will get diminished.

Do not change your (Business Name, Business Address, Business Phone Number) NAP unless absolutely necessary. If you have to, make sure you change ALL your previously created citations with the new information.

The important thing to note here is that citations are “mentions” — even if there is no link back to your website. If a third party website mentions your website, it can be referred as a citation. And it doesn’t matter if that website has created a backlinks to your website or not.

A very common example is that of online view of the users, customers on the website and the online yellow pages or other directory websites. In online directories, businesses details are often listed and mentioned, but links are not always created back to the websites of those businesses. Those listings or mentions are known as citations.

Why Are Citations Important?

In SEO, citations are very important and it can make up to 25% of the local SEO factors. They are considered a crucial SEO search engine ranking factor. The more citations to our business website lead to better positioning of our website and finally lead to get higher search engine rankings.

In other words, a business with more citations is going to appear higher in the search engine rankings than a business with fewer citations.

Citations are also important because search engines acquire important business-related information from these listings. They become all the morecrucial for small businesses, because a lot of independent business owners don’t have well optimized websites.

Sources to Get Citations

A few possible sources from where you can get them:

Third-Party Websites: Third-party websites such as Yelp, Foursquare, and Hot Frog etc. are regularly crawled by search engines (Bing, Google, etc.). We need to have as many citations on these websites so when search engines crawlers crawl they find our business in these websites.

Local Blogs: Local blogs are also great places to get our business mentioned. We can find many interesting local blogs by running a simple Google search. The best thing about using this search string is that the blogs that do appear in the SERPs are likely to have a good reputation in the eyes of search engines. They are likely to be well established and will give us better SEO value. So we should try and publish guest posts on good established blog post websites to get a good citation and even a back link to our site.

Local Business Directories: Every local area has a local online business directory. Search engines pay a lot of attention to these local business directories — especially the ones that are spam-free. These local business directories should be in our important list to get your business cited.

Reviews / Feedback: We should try getting 5 star reviews and feedback from our clients.
Reviews that we get on websites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, and Zomato etc from our clients are very valuable. A good quality review for our business can multiple the sales within days and a bad review can affect adversely. This plays a very important role of citation. Search engines keep crawling the reviews with stars and provide relevant search results that user is looking for. If a search result that user comes across has a negative review to our business it will adversely affect our business growth and a positive feedback or a review will convert the lead into sales immediately via citation.

So in order to achieve our business goals of getting a higher search engine ranking and generating more online sales, we need to pay special attention to this prominent factor i.e. citations. Hence we should always keep getting high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites, customers, users, etc with positive reviews for our business.

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