The first step in the citation clean-up process is to find out exactly what information is actually out there about your business. There are hundreds of areas where citations – a mention of your business name and address, phone number or website – can be established for your business.
Every local business have to concentrate on mounting a strong foundation of citations that will not only widen their brand visibility, but also fortifies search engines’ “trust” in the validity of their business’ existence. High quality citations are also considered as one of the most important ranking factors in such a highly competitive local search market.
- Optimising for Local Search
It is the use of specialised Web search engines that enables users to submit constrained searches against a database of local business listings. A good search engine query incorporates information about “what” the site visitor is searching for- like keywords, a business category, or the name of a product, and information such as street address, city name and postal code. Search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) browse the websites for any citation that will substantiate the information that they have in their inventory. Most local businesses will perform a well-planned citation building campaign that ensures that their business will be listed in as many relevant, high quality local directories as possible. Quantum is one of the companies that provide SEO services and always take into consideration optimising for local search as a way to clean citations for your site in order to rank higher in SERPs.
- Linking to Local Blogs
If you want your business to get listed, linking to local blogs is a great way. They clearly vary depending on a particular area, but if you search for “[yourcity] + blogs” on your preferred search engine, it’s highly likely that you will see good blogs. The sites that come up in the results, by definition, are sites that are highly indexed by the search engine, and are highly associated with a specific city, or region in local results. The businesses that have been mentioned and linked to on these blogs are considered as trusted and relevant sites in SERPs. Ensuring that your links are on these types of sites is a great way to clean up your citations and boost your search rankings.
- Listing on Local Directories
Listing your business in local directories is a great way to clean up your citations for a number of valid reasons.
- Local directories are highly indexed by search engines. These directories are also highly linked to a specific region or city.
- Directories which have been manually edited are much better than free-for-all directories.
- Manually edited directories are less vulnerable to spam, and are therefore much more trusted by search engines.
Try to do searches for: “[your_city] + directory” or “[your_state] + directory” so you can find reliable directories for such citations. Quantum in Sydney provides SEO services that can help you on improving your search engine ranking.
- Listing on Business-Specific Directories and Blogs
If the directory or the blog focuses on the topics or keywords that are related to your company, or your products and/or services, it may be one of the sites that search engines classify as clean citation sources even though it is not really specific to a certain neighbourhood, city or region. Quantum takes into consideration listing on trusted sites as a strategy in cleaning up your citation to rank higher in search.
Conclusion
While there is a major possible ranking benefit of cleaning up this data, there is another reason it should be on your radar too. If you’re a fan of brand consistency, then you want to be the least imperfect and ensure all information about your company is accurate across all mediums you control.