A visit to any community blog, forum or social media site is enough to give a person the impression that citations indeed are the future of Local SEO. With the numerous discussions, reviews, opinions and trends about local businesses jamming the internet, citations have become a perpetual topic of discussion for all.
Many aspects related to Local SEO are dynamic in nature, but in the present scenario, the heart and soul of Local SEO is “Citation” and this fact is not going to change as far as we know.
At this point, understanding the Importance of Citations as the core principle of Local SEO will prepare you for almost any change that may happen.
Let us delve deeper into this topic and explore the basics of citations in simple terms, refraining from the use of technical industry jargon.
After reading this blog, you will know-
- What are Citations
- How Citations benefit Local & Small companies
- How they impact Local SEO
- Why Citation Consistency is so important
- Conclusions
What are Citations?
If you look up the word citation online or in a dictionary, you will find a number of definitions. The one that’s most relevant to the meaning of local citations in our context is:
“The act of citing or quoting a reference to an authority or a precedent”
How does this definition of ‘citations’ translate for local businesses when it comes to local search?
A local citation is simply an online mention of your NAP (business name, address and phone number) that acts as an authority for search engines. These are typically found in online directories and community blogs.
Unlike links, citations don't need to be linked to your business's website in order for you to be credited for them.
Why are Citations Important?
Consumers mentioning a local brand within an online platform can offer a number of benefits to small businesses and local brands that ultimately allow such businesses to increase their visibility within each major search engine.
Citations offer the following benefits:
They impact local search ranking because search engines rely on the consistency of your business details in an online database.
As we know, Google likes to have lots of information about your business that it can refer to. The more evidence it can find, the more credibility it gives to all that information and your business.
Citations also support online conversions. They help customers find your business.
Online consumers are more likely to engage with a local business if they have positive reviews. According to a recent report offered by BrightLocal, 74 percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
How Do Citations Impact Local SEO?
In simple terms, citations help you get discovered by the people looking for the services you provide. But as with everything related to SEO, citations too seem simple in principle; there is a lot going on when we dig deeper into this.
Citations from well-established and indexed portals (E.g. - Yelp) help increase credibility and trust points search engines assign to your business's contact information and categorization. Quality and quantity of consumer citations and NAP determine how well you rank in local search results.
Since Google has to manually review business details for millions of companies, it uses only those data points, it can process programmatically to establish your rankings on the search engine results pages.
Why Citation (NAP) Consistency is So Important?
The most important thing is to make sure that all of your business data is consistent across the internet. For example, having one citation with your phone number as “72959599″ and another as “1800 959599″ can weaken the power of both the citations. Even having “St.” on some and “Street” on the others can affect your online credibility.
It may not seem like much from the surface, but in reality, it can make a big difference.
Remember that at the end of the day, Google is just a machine, albeit a highly intelligent, astute and hungry one.
You need to feed it consistent and quality data if you want to be rewarded in the local search results.
Conclusions
Nowadays, being #1 on Google is no longer enough to be successful.
Attracting your customers and persuading them to buy from you is not enough either.
To be really successful, local businesses need to avoid citation inconsistency and provide experiences that elicit positive online reviews as it can catalyze word-of-mouth marketing across social networks and other user-generated content websites.
Most of the big brands have understood it already.
For most of them (Nestle, Pepsi, Telstra, Samsung and more), brand reputation and loyalty are very important as they help them to build brand knowledge and let people understand their brand idea.
Though we cannot fully foresee the future of Local SEO, we can predict a few things based on historical evolution-
Perhaps one day, Local SEO will only be about ‘Citation & Nearby’-
And how it happened, won’t really matter then...
We would love to hear your comments and views.
You can talk to us on Facebook, Twitter or through the comments section, below.
So shoot away all your questions- we may even feature them in our upcoming blog posts.
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