If you just start your business and your business is new, you are required to speed on local citation building quickly. Local search experts agree that you should build 20-50+ new citations within the first 2 months of your business opening its doors.

Submitting Citations

You must be proficient in the art of generating new links to successfully use citation as part of your local SEO strategy.

Unexpectedly, this means you are going through the laborious process of collecting accurate business data (at least your NAP) for business directories. You can do this either manually, using your business data one at a time on each citation site, or automatically, using a tool or data aggregator.

Alternatively, you can use a service such as BrightLocal’s Citation Builder to create citations for you!

Using a Data Aggregator

Many businesses prefer to use a data aggregator to improve performance when building local links. The four main data aggregators are fact sheets: Foursquare (since Asiex retires in December 2019), Factual, Neustar Localez, and Infogroup. Our own Miles Anderson argues that data aggregators are essentially information aggregators.

He explains,

“Local Data Aggregators (LDAs) are companies that gather data about local businesses and then sell or distribute that data out to a network of local search engines, third-party directories, mapping services, GPS services and mobile apps. Submitting via Local Data Aggregators involves creating an account on each LDA and updating or submitting business data into the LDA’s database. The LDA then performs a verification of the business information before making this business info available to the third-party services that buy or take its data.”

If you decide to use a data aggregator when considering how to obtain new citations, it is worth keeping in mind that a data aggregator can take a lot of tedious legwork from the citation creation process.

Yelp is one such example of a data aggregator that you may already be familiar with when referring to Dan Libson of the Local SEO Guide, “Yelp is one of the primary citation sources. They syndicate their reviews in multiple places (Apple Maps etc) and among certain demographics are widely used for local discovery.”

Location3’s David Kelly has a different take, noting,

“As apps become more and more important, Foursquare and Factual have positioned themselves well in the aggregator space over the past year, providing robust data sets and APIs for mobile app developers. Apps can be hard to measure compared to typical sites, which has brought additional complication to analysis and strategy, but has offered unique opportunities as well. It will be interesting to see how this continues to evolve, and how the more legacy aggregators evolve to compete.”

Quality and Relevance

Now we’ve answered the question, “what is citation building?” it pays to go a little further and ask, “what is good citation building?”

With Link, there is a segment of quality control to keep in mind. You should aim to build links to sites that are either widely used (like Yelp or the Yellow Pages) or are very related to your industry or location.

It is proven by researchers that quality and relevance of citations are more vital than quantity, so it’s better to make good quality sites where possible. 64% of local SEO experts say niche and industry directories offer the best measure of authority for structured citations, with 18% saying national directories offer the most authority.

Industry associations, local business groups and local news sites are the best candidates for good quality unstructured citations.

Identifying Existing Citations

Before you start determining new business listings, you would need to determine what citations you already have. A tool like BrightLocal’s Citation Tracker is extremely helpful here. This not only makes it easier to search the Internet for all current links for your business. It also makes it much simpler to reveal incorrect information and irregularity in NAP and take suitable remedial action.

It is important to provide consistent and accurate information if you provide incomplete or inaccurate details can lead to a loss of trust not only in search engines that rely on data for ranking purposes, but also among consumers.

We interviewed a panel of consumers about local listings and local citations to find out if they’re as crucial from a sales perspective as they are from a search one. 93% of consumers said incorrect business directory information frustrates them, 80% will lose trust and 68% would stop using a local business wholly if they found misleading information in online directories.

Competitor Research and Identifying New Opportunities

If you’ve taken out any form of SEO before learning what citation building is, it’s probably that you’ll have done some competitor link research to determine what sites are linking to competitors and providing them a search engine edge. This same concept should be carried across to local citation buildings.

The process of finding new citations can actually be as simple as finding which sites your competitors are on that you aren’t. A tool like Citation Tracker is, again, helpful here, as it can automate the process of spying on competitors, compiling a citation report and then identifying targeted niche and local citation opportunities to explore.