Supercharge your citations

Get optimal coverage by combining manual submissions and data aggregators.

As well as manual listings, you can also submit to data aggregators to widen your reach at a minimal cost. Data aggregators push your business information to 100s of business directories, mobile apps, and mapping services worldwide.

A local citation is any mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number online. Many SEOs believe they’re a key ranking factor for local SEO.

Citations appear in lots of different places: business directories, social networks—anywhere someone might be looking for information about local businesses.

Why are citations important?

Citations are useful for two main things:

• 
  Ranking higher for local search queries (maybe)

• Helping people discover your business online

How citations help with local SEO

Citations are believed to help search engines verify the existence, legitimacy, and trustworthiness of your business. If the same details appear across many relevant and trusted websites, then Google likely has increased confidence that your business exists, is operational, and that what you say about it is true.

What types of citations are there?

Before we talk about how to build citations, we need to understand the two types of citations you can get.

Structured citations

A structured citation lists the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of a business. Directory listings and social media profiles are good examples of these. Each company’s information is displayed in the same way, and the page is effectively built around that data.

Unstructured citations

An unstructured citation is a contextual mention of a business. They usually show up in blog posts, forum posts, or as a result of press mentions.

How do I build citations?

Most businesses will benefit from having some structured and unstructured citations. But there’s no need to get them from every site you come across. It’s very much a case of quality trumps quantity here.

Step #1. Get listed with the ‘big three’ data aggregators

There are thousands of business directories on the web. If each of them relied on business owners submitting NAP information directly, they’d probably have a lot of gaps in their data. Most business owners just aren’t going to submit to thousands of websites.

Data aggregators solve this problem. These companies collect information about businesses and distribute it to hundreds of other websites. If these folks have your information, you’ll end up with citations in lots of places.

In the US, there are currently three main data aggregators:

• Express Update (by Infogroup)

• Neustar localeze

• Factual

SIDENOTE. Acxiom used to be important as they were yet another big data aggregator, but they discontinued their product at the end of 2019.

It’s completely free to claim, submit, and manage business listings with InfoGroup (Express Update) and Neustar Localeze. Just search for your business and claim the listing if it’s there. If not, submit a new one.

Just make sure to search for your business thoroughly and claim any listings before submitting a new one. You need to make sure that you claim any duplicates and that the information is correct.

With Factual, you can no longer update or edit listings directly. You have to work with one of their Trusted Data Contributors (TDC), and that usually costs a small fee. My advice is to search their directory for your business and check the information they have. If it’s accurate, no worries. If it’s inaccurate, then you can always work with a TDC like Yext or WhiteSpark to correct it. However, my personal opinion is that it probably isn’t worth it for most businesses, so don’t worry about Factual too much.

Step #2. Submit to other core sites

The ‘big three’ data aggregators distribute NAP information to many well-known sites, but not all of them. That’s why it’s often useful to submit to the core sites in your country directly.

In the US, these are sites like:

• Apple Maps

• Facebook

• Yelp

• Bing Places

• YellowPages

• BBB

• Foursquare

You can find a full list of the most important citation sources in the US here, and for other countries here. Just know that this is only one company’s interpretation of the “most important” citation sources. There are plenty of these lists around, and while there is undoubtedly a lot of overlap, they’re rarely identical.

Personally, I don’t believe it’s worth submitting to all these sites. I’ve never even heard of most of them, and some seemingly get hardly any traffic.

That’s hardly surprising given how this particular site looks. I can’t imagine anyone using this to find a local business (maybe in 1995?)

My advice, then, is to look through this list and submit to the sites that seem worth it.

How do you know which ones they are? If you’ve heard of them, then chances are they’re worth submitting to (assuming it’s free). Otherwise, a good proxy for quality is to Google “[your industry] in [location]” and see if they’re anywhere to be seen in the top 100 search results.

For example, if we search for “plumber in new york,” we see Thumbtack and AngiesList in the results.

SIDENOTE. It’s unlikely that submitting to all the sites on the list will do any harm. But many of them probably won’t help much either. Ultimately, it’s up to you.

In terms of submitting your business to these sites, you have two options.

Submit manually

If you have plenty of spare time and don’t mind mundane tasks, you can submit to these sites one by one. Just search for your business on each seemingly worthwhile site. If it’s already there, make sure the information is accurate. If it isn’t accurate, look for an option to claim the listing (most sites have this) and correct the errors. If it isn’t there, add it.

Use a submission and management service

Submitting the same business information to multiple sites by hand is nobody’s idea of fun. That’s why a few companies have built solutions to make this process easier. Yext is perhaps the most well-known of these companies. They integrate with hundreds of well-known sites directly, meaning you can submit and manage your citations from one place.

You’ll even find that some sites only allow submissions through Yext.

That said, Yext isn’t the only company to offer submission and management services. Companies like BrightLocal and Whitespark offer them too.

In terms of whether these submission services are worth it, it’s hard to say. Every SEO will have a different opinion on that. Personally, given that these services are far from cheap, I would say that your money is probably better spent elsewhere. I would just manually add listings to the handful of sites that matter most and call it a day.

Step #3. Submit to popular industry and local sites

Now that you’ve taken care of the “baseline” citations, the next step is to hunt down popular industry-and-geo-specific citation opportunities.

For example, if you run a hotel, you’ll want to make sure you’re listed on TripAdvisor. If you’re an attorney, then you’ll want to make sure you’re on findlaw.com. If you’re a realtor, then you should be on realtor.com. You get the picture. These are industry-specific citation opportunities.

The physical location of your business will give way to more citation opportunities. For instance, you’ll probably want to get listed with the local Chamber of Commerce and other local business associations.

There are a few ways to find these opportunities.

a) Use Google

Head to Google and search for simple things like:

[location] chamber of commerce

[location] business directory

[industry] business directory

[industry] business listings

There’s no need to submit to every site you come across. Use your best judgment to identify the sites that are worth it.

b) Use an industry citations list

There are quite a few of these online, although this one from BrightLocal is one of the best. It lists popular citation opportunities for over 40 business categories.

c) Use Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool

Most citations feature the business’s name, address, phone number, and website URL. This is known as a NAPW citation (the “W” stands for “website”).

Although these backlinks are usually nofollowed, you can use their existence to discover citation opportunities. Just search Google for competing businesses, then paste three or more of their homepage URLs into Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool. In the bottom field, add your homepage URL and set all the modes to “URL.”

SIDENOTE. Don’t paste the homepages of business directories into the tool. You should only use the homepages of competing local businesses.

Hit “Show link opportunities,” and you’ll see websites that link to one or more of the homepages you entered, but not yours.

However, it’s quite hard to tell why these links exist from the list alone. So you’ll want to hit the caret to get more context about each link.

The one above looks like a directory listing. We can confirm that by visiting the referring page.

Step #4. Pursue unstructured citations

If you’ve gotten to this stage, then you’ve likely already trumped most of your competitors when it comes to structured citations. What we haven’t really talked about yet are unstructured citations.

Unstructured citations are a different beast altogether. They tend to come from press mentions, reviews, and blog posts about your business. That means they’re harder to get than structured citations. Someone actually has to care enough about your business to write about it.

For example, Milk Beach, a London coffee shop, gets cited in this article from GQ about the best coffee shops in London:

You’ll notice that there’s also a backlink to the coffee shop’s website, and it’s a ‘followed’ link too. That’s common with unstructured citations, and it’s partly why they’re so powerful for SEO.

SIDENOTE. Not all unstructured citations have backlinks. The example above would still be an unstructured citation if it didn’t link to the coffee shop’s website.

Let’s look at a few ways to find unstructured citation opportunities.