Citations are one of the most important factors in local SEO.
In layman’s language it means getting your business listed on quality websites. It doesn’t require your website to be linked, but it needs your business name and address and business phone number to be listed on quality websites. This Google and other search engines crawls and give relevant importance to your business.
In SEO, citations are referred as “mentions” of your business on other websites and web pages. A local citation is anywhere where the business name, address, and phone number are all together listed. In the Local SEO world, it is commonly known as ‘NAP’.
But citations should come from authoritative websites, because having your business listed on high-quality websites is going to help you more in the search engine rankings than being listed on low-quality websites. Therefore, one of your local SEO strategies should be to first target as many high quality and authoritative websites as you can. Once we start getting citations from these websites, we can gradually expand our reach. It’ll boost your local business with a strong citation profile and that will help you in achieving higher search engine rankings.
Business Name, Business Address, and Business Phone Number structure and use it exactly across the web. Do not change it.
For instance, “SEO Service in Chandigarh” and “SEO Company in Chandigarh” is an examples of inconsistency. If we are using different business names, addresses, and phone numbers while creating citations then our website’s SEO value will get diminished.
Do not change your (Business Name, Business Address, Business Phone Number) NAP unless absolutely necessary. If you have to, make sure you change ALL your previously created citations with the new information.
The important thing to note here is that citations are “mentions” — even if there is no link back to your website. If a third-party website mentions your website, it can be referred as a citation. And it doesn’t matter if that website has created a backlink to your website or not.
A very common example is that of online view of the users, customers on the website and the online yellow pages or other directory websites. In online directories, businesses details are often listed and mentioned, but links are not always created back to the websites of those businesses. Those listings or mentions are known as citations.
In SEO, citations are very important and it can make up to 25% of the local SEO factors. They are considered a crucial SEO search engine ranking factor. The more citations to our business website leads to better positioning of our website and finally leads to get higher search engine rankings.
In other words, a business with more citations is going to appear higher in the search engine rankings than a business with fewer citations.
Citations are also important because search engines acquire important business-related information from these listings. They become all the more crucial for small businesses, because a lot of independent business owners don’t have well optimized websites.
