This is the time of fierce competition with a lot of businesses looking for everything that can help them pull one across the competition. Although several companies ignore citations for their local SEO efforts they can help your company quite a bit by bringing in more clients. Citations are one of the ranking factors used in the local searches. Many successful SEO experts began their careers by managing citations for the stakeholders of the business. Let’s take a closer look at the citations and how they may help you.
What are the citations?
A citation is the mention of you or your company on the web in any way. It could be just the name of your business, or the name and phone number of your business, or the name, phone number, and link to the company site. Even the phone numbers as standalone entities work as a citation. Any citation that includes all the NAP information is termed as a complete citation and the ones that are missing any of the information are called partial citations. For the citation to be helpful to your local SEO strategy, significantly, it matches with the NAP information on your site. The format is inconsequential here but selecting a format and being consistent is important.
Significance of a citation
A citation is one of the significant factors considered by Google while deciding the business ranking for local SEO. For the Google algorithm, it is logical that a business that is mentioned more on the internet should get a higher ranking than other businesses that are not mentioned at all. The citations are used by these algorithms to verify the accuracy of the business’s listing as well. This is because many times these listings contain out of date information. If the NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information is verified, Google will feel confident about displaying it to the searchers. These citations are responsible for increasing the awareness of your business and help people reach you via the internet. The more citations you have greater are the chances of users seeing the citation and contact you.
One of the under-rated advantages of building citations is that many online business directories dominate the SERPs for the local searches. Sites such as YellowPages and Yelp will consistently rank high in the case of local searches. So, the idea here is, if you can’t beat them join them. There are other benefits associated with these online directories as well and all this contributes towards earning that place on the first page of Google SERPs. In addition to this several people are loyal to certain citations. For instance, they will go to Yelp for a list of restaurants. Being listed in several high-rated directories is also useful in getting valuable referral-traffic to your business.
Quality or quantity
Well, it is important to have both for a higher ranking. But if you have a lot of citations without accurate NAP information then it is likely that you will lie behind in the position on the search engine results page. In case you have quality over quantity you will again suffer as you are behind your competition in the eyes of Google. The volume of citations that can be ideal depends on the volume your competitors have while the quality of a citation depends on several factors and all of these factors are within your control. Keep in mind that you need to take care of quality first and then move to quantity.
There are many tools available on the internet to track the performance of various citations. If you are looking to lay a solid foundation for your local SEO efforts by using the services of professionals you can get in touch with Affordable SEO Company especially for the Tampa, FL area.