Local SEO Citations are Important

Local SEO Citations are an important part of building backlinks as well as authority for your local business and gaining more credibility and ranking in the eyes of the search engines. Sacramento SEO offer professional SEO consultant services that help websites increase organic search drastically and compete for 1st page rankings of highly competitive keywords. A citation is where your business or practice is mentioned on another website along with your address and phone number. Many citations do not always have links as many businesses and practices do not have a website.

Some citations carry more weight with the search engines than others. These include organizations like the BBB.org , The Yahoo Directory or even if you have a listing in a wiki source like Wikipedia .

Gain Local SEO Citations by More Mentions

You can gain local seo citations by blogging, being listed in local business directories, in the Yellow Pages or equivalents,other directories or having your business story in your local indexed newspaper. In an earlier post I discussed the importance of using tools like Universal Business Listings in order to get a consistent distribution of your information to directory databases and making sure this same consistent listing is followed in your Google Business listing or Google Places, which at the time of writing is going through many changes. Continue to gain listings every week on a gradual basis and you will discover you will move up in rankings in search as well as in the Google Maps listing box.

Local SEO Citation Tools

A valuable local citation finder for checking your local citations , as well as those of your competition is supplied by Edmonton-based Whitespark.ca and developed by Ontolo’s Garrett French (@ontolo) and Whitespark founder Darren Shaw (@EdmontonSEO). There are free and pro versions available at Local Search Finder

This tool does a search for you and basically takes your search term for example “Cambridge Dentists” and then gathers the phone numbers of the top ranking sites,performs a search for each of the phone numbers then goes out and finds all the citation sources that list the top ranking sites. The Pro Version then lets you sort the list by AC Rank as supplied by Majestic SEO and SEO Moz Domain Authority by SEOMoz.

Here are some screenshots of the results:

You can then see places where you should have local seo citations that matter.

Here are two excellent listings of potential local sources compiled by expert Toronto local search marketer Dev Basu.
Canadian Ultimate Citations Guide
US Local Search Citation Sources

STOP PRESS

The landscape is always changing as Google amends their products. Read these valuable articles below with their takes on this measure. Organic ( below the ads on a search result page _SERP) search results are different types of listings than the Places Listings The more backlinks from the most credible sites certinly helps your ranking as long as they are not spammy link-farm drivel.

Search Engine Land’s Matt McGhee
This process is available to all free on the web by doing it yourself or it can be an integral part of any activity you could utilize the Silent Seller to do professionally on your behalf.

Related articles

• No, Local SEO Isn’t Dead … But It Is a Wee Bit Harder (smallbusinesssem.com)
• How to Research Local Citations After Google Removed them from Places (seomoz.org)
• More Detailed Thoughts on Google’s Place Page Shift (davidmihm.com)
• Local SEO: Staying Ahead of the Pack (searchenginepeople.com)