Local SEO has become increasingly important for all business, but small businesses are affected the most. As the percentage of mobile searches increases, Google's algorithm begins to assume that more and more of them have local intent.
This week, Rand discusses Local Citation and the best ways to utilize the resources out there for your local SEO. He also mentions our new BFFs, GetListed.org! If you haven't already gone in to claim your business' profiles, do that now (or after the video).
p.s. I strongly recommend checking out the Best Sources for Local Citations by City and by Category on GetListed, as well!
Video Transcription
"Hi, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking about discovering local citation opportunities. So, as many of you might be aware, we are tremendously excited here at SEOmoz to welcome David Mihm and GetListed.org into the family. We're excited for the future of what those tools and resources are going to be. There's already some fantastic information that I urge you to check out on David's site and on GetListed.org.
But I wanted to get really specific today and talk about the local citations themselves. So some of you are probably aware of what goes into local and map style data. Local and maps data is really important because, as you're probably aware - you might have to follow me over here - the search results, if I do a query in here, there's oftentimes an organic set of results and then what we sort of call the "Local OneBox".
The Local OneBox will have some results that are like, "A, B, C, D", and they'll line up to a map that's over here on the right-hand side. Sometimes these can kind of dominate the results. Depending on where you are, especially if you're on a mobile phone, Google is going to assume that a lot of your queries have a local intent behind them.
Many queries that are done from the desktop now are assumed to have local intent, and certainly anytime you add a modifier - a city name, an address, a ZIP code, those kinds of things - Google is going to think local intent. This means those local results can dominate a lot of search queries, and a ton of searches today are already resulting in a lot of these local types of listings.
Now, local listings use a different algorithm, and that different algorithm is made up by a number of different things: structured and unstructured citations, which are the big important ones we're going to be talking about today, as well as things like reviews, the geography, your business name, links that come into your site. Links sort of are varied in importance as to how much they matter for local. They matter somewhat. We're not exactly sure quite how much, but it's not zero. These determine your local ranking in the five-pack, three-pack, seven-pack, eight-pack, whatever it is, and the map rankings.
There's one interesting thing that I want to note about this before we get specifically into citations, which is remember that this data all applies to one listing if you're doing it right. A lot of the time people are doing it wrong.
So I got to spend my morning here at SEOmoz on a help team working with Joel. One of the queries we answered through the help ticketing system was someone who had some challenges because her business name down in South Florida was in several different locations, or was listed in Google and in Bing with several different locations, incorrect addresses, incorrect ZIP code, all this type of stuff.
That creates a lot of problems, because Google can't identify and say, "Aha, this all applies to this." It's, "Oh, well maybe some of these structured citations are for this, and then these are the structured citations are for that, and I think this review applies to that and not to this one." You don't want that. You want everything going all to one place. Just like with classic SEO, you want everything to be on one domain, hopefully one sub-domain, and in sub-folders.
Some citation tactics, you need to find citations, both structured and unstructured citations, structured citations being the ones that are very formalized, that Google is sort of sucking in and recognizing as formal addresses, and unstructured being more of the sort of casual mentions and references to a business location. Sometimes they might include an address detail or a phone number detail. But they're usually not in that clean sort of name, address, phone number, location, all that type of stuff. They don't have the schema.org markup. They're not coming from necessarily a trusted local citation provider, something like that, but still very important. In fact, unstructured citations oftentimes, David will tell me, are the factor that's pushing a ranking over the edge and letting it appear in the maps pack or letting it rank higher.
So I want you to start with some competitive queries. This is the obvious one, but search for businesses that are ranking next to yours. You want to be searching for their name and/or the address. For example, if I were searching for SEOmoz, I might search for SEOmoz itself, minus site:SEOmoz.org. I might also search for 119 Pine Street #400, 119 Pine Street, and SEOmoz Seattle, those kinds of things.
I want to do this off their website. So I'd probably add the query string minus site:SEOmoz.org, so as not to get overwhelmed with results from the domain that I'm reference checking against. This will show you lots of places where that site, where that local business is listed.
SEOmoz is obviously not a great example because we're a web business, so we're all over the web. But for a local business, this type of query can work really well.
Also, look at reviews from around the web. That section appears on the Google+ local page. So if you pull up the Google+ local listing for any local small business, you will see, sort of around the middle before you get to the reviews, it will show you this, "Reviews from Around the Web." It'll show you a few different sources, sometimes three, sometimes four.
You can also find a few that are sometimes different in the "More Reviews" section, which is on the knowledge base OneBox. So that would be if I perform a search query for, say, if you search for David Mihm, you'll actually see a nice photo of him up here. Then you'll see "More Reviews," and it'll say places like Yelp or CitySearch or those types of things. Check both of those. They can show you places where your competition is listed, where you might not have a listing, great citation source.
Events, press, bios, and beyond, these are going to be very unstructured reviews typically. But anytime your business or yourself are going to be mentioned anywhere around the web, on some other website, you should try to employ your full address, phone, and business name. So this means if I knew that SEOmoz were in a very competitive battle for local rankings, I probably would have my bio say this type of stuff.
I would make sure that on social sites, even if there's not a formal address field, that I have some information. So I wouldn't just say SEOmoz and what we do. I would say, "I work at SEOmoz. Here's the address and the phone number." I would include both of those in the description or whatever of where I work.
Other places you can do this - job ads, anytime you're putting out a job ad, press releases, events that you host or sponsor. Places where you make a charitable contribution will often have a listing, and you can get that listing to include your address and phone number. If you can't get both, you can go for the phone number or just the address.
This is a lot like link building. You want the link to be in a certain way. You want it to point to a particular page. You'd like that link to contain certain anchor text, and for local the citation is all about connecting up the business information properly as it appears.
Last tip for this, use broad categories. One of the things that I see people doing in local a lot of times is they get very obsessed with, "Well, I'm a certain type of tax attorney, and here are the five people ranking against me. Here's where they have their citations, and I'm done."
But if you can broaden that out to say things like, "I'm not just going to query tax attorneys. I'm going to look for attorneys, and I'm going to look for lawyers. I'm going to find all the listing sources for all the folks in there. I'm also going to broaden out by not just looking at who's appearing in that little OneBox. I'm going to click down to 'More Results' from the maps page and keep scrolling down, keep finding more and more places and see where they're listed using the competitive searching systems."
You can also run broad searches for the query that you're looking for plus city name. So, for example, things like, I might say, "tax attorney Seattle", "attorney Seattle", "lawyer Seattle", and then I'd look at all the places that are listing. Those can be opportunities as well for either structured or unstructured citations that can help move your rankings up.
When you do this, dig into the far back of the results. A lot of the time, I see that the top 20 include a lot of places where everyone is mentioned. But 50, 60, 70 results in, I'm still finding gold in terms of citation opportunities.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you'll check out GetListed, which is a fantastic tool. It can help you with some of this stuff and certainly with your local listings, and I hope you have good luck getting your citations and your reviews in order. Thanks everyone. Take care."
Great ideas, Rand! I assume a lot of local-search-related whiteboards and blog posts are going to be coming up now that David is part of the team :) This also adds-up greatly to the fortnight-ago presentation by Dana di Tomasso.
I just wanted to point to a few other articles tackling pretty much the same topic and they provide some additional awesome ideas:
5 Ridiculously Sneaky Citations Most Small Business Never Think to Get!
10 Unorthodox Ideas For Local Citations & Links
3 More Unorthodox Ideas For Local Citations & Links
The Definitive List of Local Search Citations
And of course your own piece:
Google Places Citations: 5 More Tactics to Earn Links for Your Local Business
Cheers,
Nyagoslav
Nyagoslav, you rock!
You too, Matt! And your post, too :)
yeah! :)
Agreed! Thanks for the additional resources.
Great links, Nyagoslav. I feel like there's a great post on SEER Interactive about this as well but for the life of me I can't find it right now; if there's anyone from SEER following the thread, definitely add it!
Is it this one?
Thanks so much for these resources Nyagoslav. I read the Search Engine Land one, which was great. But, any resources for citations and ideas are always helpful. Cheers
I'd suggest you also check this mozinar.
Thanks for the link Nyagoslav! I was just coming on here to post that.
Thanks Nyagoslav for the links :)
Great links Nyagoslav !!
Nyagoslav Your comment is really awesome you Posted all Local Citations and links.Thanks for great Comment.
Thanks for the additional links. That' is great. Blair
I do marketing for a couple attorneys in Akron, Ohio. While Akron is a decent-sized city, lawyers in the area are pretty slow to adopt online, local marketing (let alone forecast trends and lead the way by making sure they're included in pertinent local citations). So, the competitive search in my area is an [okay] reference point to make sure I haven't missed out on opportunities for my attorneys that other attorneys in the area are taking advantage of. However:
I like to search for "attorneys new york" "lawyers new york city" "tax attorney new york" etc. I know attorneys in New York are paying a lot of money for marketing (because the area is so competitive) and usually these marketers are foreseeing trends and doing competitor research in the NY area, so the directories that show up for those search queries become more valuable as more marketers add more and more local businesses to each one.
I go into each NY directory that shows up and check if they offer local-inclusion for any area (not just NY). Usually, they do. So, I add my attorneys with their real, local, Akron address, website, phone number, business name, and email address. Both my attorneys show up in the A position consistently for their respective areas of practice search queries. They also both have the most and best reviews (all legitimate because they are both really great people and lawyers) so I think that helps, a lot, too!
I will say, my attorneys politely ask their clients to review on google + if they had a good experience and I've created a simple badge that links directly to the review section so my attorneys can just email it to their clients.
I love, love local marketing. I love doing it for my clients and for my business~ it's so fun because, I don't know about you, but I love my city of Akron! I hold little, local events and even guerrilla marketing around the city to gain online exposure. Thank you for the post and I really look forward to more local whiteboards!!
If you're getting started with local marketing and unfamiliar with Mike Blumenthal- he's the source to bookmark...https://blumenthals.com/blog/
Great stuff. I just moved in-house to a law firm and I have been working on citation building for them in the area and I think what you are saying is a great jumping off point for more. Thankfully, I have attorneys that get it and are excited to do what is needed
I love local marketing as well and I think for a similar reason, I love my city. I think being able to be part of the community that you love is always a rewarding experience
I like your idea of looking to more competitive cities to catch the latest trends and tactics that you can then use in your town, I think that's a great strategy that applies to more than just local search. I'm gonna save that one for later.
Some great ideas here. I am a real estate agent in a small town and am always picking up on "big city" tactics that I can use locally. I like your idea for sourcing citation opportunities.
Wanna know how to build great links locally? ... The old fashioned way, get out there and mingle. While it's not absolutely glorious for some clients or business areas, it is an extremely viable and easy way of obtaining links.
I've never had trouble developing relationships with local people, then again I live in a pretty high-tech and friendly town (Austin). I think it's the best part of marketing in general, just getting out there and meeting new people and discussing business.
Don't be afraid to leave the warm and familiar lighting of your LCD and pound some ground!
Rand - thanks for the great tips ! I'm working with a university now who is trying to get more enrollments from local community colleges, so local has definitely come up on our radar.
Unrelated request -- you wrote about the ranking influence of Facebook Likes and Facebook Shares (along with Twitter) back in 2011 (https://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings ) and then search metrics did a very interesting study of this last June (https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2012/06/07/us-and-uk-seo-ranking-factors-2012/). Now that "Shares" have been sort of deprecated by Facebook, and we have more data (and interest in this) do you think we might get an update from SEOMoz ? Ideally, I would like to see something focused exclusively on Facebook likes/shares which also discusses what Google might actually be counting and how they might be counting.
Thanks again for all your great work !
Definitely a great WBF for the local search artists out there (like myself). Being an in-house for a service based business has made me realize that the optimization for the localized map results is like the #1 thing a business can need. Having your listing above the fold, pointed out on a map, and reviews easily accessible can add a ton of value to the SERP listing.
Thanks so much for covering some solid local SEO stuff and really goes great with your co-citation WBF from a few weeks back. Working for attorneys, I also enjoy that you cover exactly what I am in the middle of lol. Anyway, now I have to go out there and get the firm some citations!
Had to watch this WF twice. I got the end of the first view and realized I'd processed absolutely nothing since I laid eyes on that gunslinger. Super helpful info; even better facial hair.
Excellent! This will really help our local estate agency. More work to add to my list, thanks :P
Gold stuff Rand, definitely incredibly useful information for location specific businesses. I'm wondering if there is anything along these lines which may benefit a news blog / website?
Great white board Friday by Rand, You share some new factors that can help us get ranked better for our local keywords and in Map listing results.
Thanks
I love local. I truly believe that it is going to much harder to "game" this algorithm. The citations have to be built naturally and on the more valuable sources you have to go through a verification process. This will cancel out a majority of "gurus" from flooding the market with their junk. I think Google can also pick up on the tricks much faster as well. I know there are already a ton of parlor tricks out there but from what I can tell, Google seems to be doing a good job of representing local businesses.
Loads of great information here. But if you have the budget I highly recommend White Sparks local citation finder. It does most of the work for you and the lowest price plan is relatively cheap. Automates most of the processes described here.
This still applies: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-for-multiple-word-order-search-phrases and could be very usefull for your local optimization strategy. This technique was left out on todays Whiteboard Friday.
Whiteboard Friday came a bit late today, I was actually keeping an eye at it since Morning and fortunately I got a chance to watch it early. I didn't understand the concept of unstructured citations? When you compare citations with links then how can a broken link help a website similar to your unstructured citations thing!
However, I liked the idea of using address, phone anywhere it is possible. I would probably use them on social profiles as well as where direct audience can land to business page.
In localized SERPs it is more of "signals" Google uses to provide the results. A business listed in a local article describing great restaurants may not have a link to the website of the business but it seems to be taking a not of that "signal" and adds another notch on the side of that business as being authentic. It seems that there is a lot more "voice" and representation being used as signals, not just definitive linking. So social mentions, community involvement, and other signals that prove local business are real.
I totally understand what you said but it is more relevant to a citation. My question is about unstructured citation? What is that and how it can help a business? Assume citation as a link and broken links never give you a bonus point so how an unstructured citation can help? Or maybe Rand was just comparing all parts of a citation with an unstructured citation!
I think when Rand said "links to a site are not as important as in universal search" is what I was going off of. A citation doesn't have to have a link back to the site to have value. The value is in the "signal" not in a "vote". You can compare it to an audience that you are trying to measure something with. Citations are signals of value much like raising hands while "links" would be more like taking a written vote.
Nabeel - check out https://getlisted.org/resources/glossary.aspx#UnstructuredCitation for more on unstructured citations.
My mozinar (sorry for the shameless plug) also talks about how to get some unorthodox unstructured citations. They do work, I promise:
https://www.seomoz.org/webinars/you-probably-think-this-citation-source-is-about-you-dont-you
Thanks Rand and Ben. You both are Genius! The getlisted glossary page has quite a long list and it is worth reading all of them :)
However, it would have been better if each of the term had a few live website examples for people like me but i still appreciate it.
Just great, Rand! I found this kind of local keyword spreading long time ago and use this "peace of pie" everyday ;)
I know from linkbuilding that it is not good to put up to many links at once in a to short time frame. I wounder if that applies here as well. I wounder if there is a limit of site to submit your local business informations. How many site in what period of time would be still ok to submit your busniness information (like business name, address, phone number etc
It would be an interesting test but when you have huge data providers like Localeze who are seen as a valuable resource to the local ecosystem, I would think timing wouldn't be that big of an issue unless you are using a really low quality directory network.
We've done both for our clients - slow acquisition over many months vs getting all the citations lined up in a few weeks. There doesn't seem to be any sort of penalty when you're doing your citation building work. Realistically, there might be only 50 to 70 decent places to get a citation (less if you're in Canada) so it's not like you're suddenly building thousands of links.
Thanks Dana DiTomaso. Very usefull to know :-)
Yup we have done similar tests to see the results of speed of citations built and results and the case when we built the citations quickly we did not see anything negative but the results were there within a few weeks.
Will try and do a proper case study and publish it on our blog soon.
Actually https://getlisted.org/, is giving only US based citation list. If you are trying to find the Citation listing status of your domain or your competitor’s domain which is located in Canada region, you will be unhappy. Because getlisted.org is only giving the US website's Citation status.
'structured and unstructured citations'- Ran told there is an importance for 'unstructured citations' too. I didn't get what is the need of unstructured citations'
If you are using ahrefs or Opensiteexplorer for finding the Citation sites, you will disappoint, because most of the Citation sites are giving No-Follow backlinks, so probably you can't able to find these citation sites by using backlink checker tool.
yeah, there is an another option to find the citation sites,
1. domain.com (Just search in Google with your domain name without http:www. then the result will show all the sites which is your domain listed . It will show both Follow and No- Follow domains)
2.Business Name + Address (Search you Business name with address, then you will be get the actual list of all Citation sites where your business is listed. Do the same with your competitor , then you will get the complete list of Citations, where all sites the competitor has been listed)
In my suggestion use the second method, then only you will get the real list of Citation Sites.
Do well,
Cheers
I feel like I'm a bit late to the party, but I had to chime in and say this is literally one of the most valuable pieces of SEO goodness I've read - both Rand's original piece and the comments.
I've had some success with local sarch for my own business, but adding these ideas to my arsenal, I fee like I can hit top spot!
Thanks all!
Hi Everyone and thanks for the video Randy.
Can anyone advise me if my interpretation of this is right in regards to using the businesses address and phone number anywhere possible?.
I noticed that Randy mentioned doing this effectively creates a backlink so I'm assuming that it would be a good idea to include the business address and number on job advertisements? I work for a recruitment agency so as you can imagine we post lots of jobs each week.
I was also curious how effective just address or number compares to having both?
Overall though fantastic video and fantastic comments.
Hi Lukewell, it is just about the whole purpose of getting citations. as long as you do it right, it is fine to mention your NAP anywhere on the web(including job postings). I assume that you use job portals and classified adds websites. it is perfectly fine to use NAP in classified adds because I already using these sites for obtaining citations.
I recently started doing SEO for a local medical group. They moved offices a little over a year ago and only updated some of their listings. Should I be changing all their incorrect listings?
I would, yes. You could claim the listing again for the new address but I would imagine that updating the existing listing would be the easiest solution.
How do you list a UK based business on Getlisted.org? It wans a a zip code and won't take a UK post code.
This was a great refresher on local SEO. I'd been out of the game for a couple of years and :smacks head: I totally forgot about the impact of local search. Thanks for the friendly reminder - and for making me look good at work, Rand! Congrats on the acquisition.
In our area, local SEO is just in it's early days, so having such a cutting edge info is just awsome, plus Rand puts it so simply that it becomes obvious.I was thinking reviews and comments were the only parameter taken into account to rank a loca listing, now I know there is much more to it and I understand the latest acquisition by SEOMoz.
By applying some of the techniques explained, I have already been able to earn a few unstructured citations for my business, hope that it will improve our ranking.
This is great, especially the link you provided i meant this Best Sources for Local Citations by City. Very big collection !!!
Thank you for such an awesome post sir! I've got a question sir, If we'll focus about our ranking as local listings with such tactics then for sure Google will help us to improve our ranking in global listings, Am i right?
Does anyone have any good tips and insight on how you handle phone verification for local listings with your clients?
This is a nice WBF last year! It is worth watching the video specially for us Local SEO. Thanks Rand!
Thanks Rand for giving us an update about local citation oppurtunities. Local SEO is one of the most vital factors if you are engaging in an online business.
Nice information ! I have collected some local business website for different industry. You can submit your business information on these local business directory. I hope it will work for you. https://www.gseoservices.co.in/2014/02/us-local-citation-sites-list-for-local_7816.html
Great white board Friday by Rand. You share some new factors that can help us get ranked better for our local keywords and get improved results in Google Map listings as well. Thanks!
Good Stuff Rand,
Thanks for share citation building tips, Local citation is very use full Business they publish their NAP detail on different local citation building site and get more local visibility,
if you looking such agency contact Web Digital Marketing, he provide you manually submission & very fast deliver with 35-40% instant approval with detail report www.webdigitalmarketing.com
Any example of Unstructured Citations?
I'm loving all of this local attention. DAGMAR Marketing does a lot of Press Releases for our clients but I hadn't thought about making sure their NAP was included to build citation sources. Very good point. I'll be changing the template we use for Press Releases to include this.
I'm excited and looking forward to all of the local discussions that will go on now that David Mihm is a part of SEOMOZ.
Good Stuff.
Thx so much Rand. This is great, and I love the tips and idea of looking at the competition to see where they are listed. I had looked at some of this for my original website, but now I have a tricky issue - a 2nd website. My 2nd website has done much better than my original one (and it uses my nickname), and it has much higher conversion/loyalty. So, naturally, I'd prefer to strengthen the 2nd one. But, I don't want to mess up the good rankings I already on the first one, and I don't want to get penalized by google for anything . So, not quite sure the best way to do it. Let me know if you have any advice.
Really Helpful video !
Thanks for your post.
Hi and thank you so much, my name is Jerry and I am a small company business owners, I own a small moving company and always wanted to get to show on the local listing with no luck yet.
I’m going to try all your suggestions!
Might this be a problem for home based businesses that do not have a business address? Not everyone would want to paste their home addresses or telephone number all over the web for fear of privacy issues. I think local businesses without a physical business address are at a disadvantage.
Great WBF. Local listing has always been important for all my clients. Nothing to do with this WBF, but I'm having hard time making changes to my local listing in google+. Changes get refused, etc..
In an evolving mobile world... A citation is the new link!
More good stuff.I am interested in seeing what new features will be added to our tracking tools do to this acquisition.
Happy Friday. Timely WBF. Congrats on the getlisted.org acquisition. I am sure that the result will be greater than the sum of the parts. I use FollowerWonk every day without fail.
Does anyone have experiences with using Yext or Whitespark to get/manage quality citations? Have had both in the radar for a long while but not made a move and given the topic, thought it would be OK to ask.
Thanks for sharing.
hey rand is this useful for every kind of business? like we have a Wallpapers website and also have EPOS system website. can we do the same for both of them?
Today's Whiteboard Friday is awesome. Thanks Rand
Rand,
great video once again. I think local citations are a natural following when you do #RCS. If you do everything the right way (which we off course should do), localization is logical following on this, don't you think? Perhaps this still works a lot different in the US then it does in the Netherlands but here we also didn't have a great advantage of Google places and local listings. It never went as viral and as big as it did in the US. Still I do feel that this could be a great selling point when selling SEO to a costumer.
Keep up the good work with the Whiteboard Friday's. Love them.
Kind regards
Jarno
Great video. Local citations are definitely important, but local businesses shouldn't forget the other factors. I recently read an article on boosting rankings of a listing in Google's "Local OneBox." They suggested that there were 5 main factors in local rankings within the OneBox:
(1) Verify your listing [seems obvious to SEO's but not to small businesses]. Of course GetListed.org can help with this.
(2) Add lots of photos of your business on your G+ Local Page.
(3) Add videos. I think you can have up to 3.
(4) Get reviews from your customers. Send them a link to your G+ Local Page and/or other sites where Google pulls reviews (CitySearch, Yelp).
(5) Citations [which you covered nicely in today's video].
Thanks for the great WBF. This is one that I'll be sharing with my clients.
My main focus is local SEO, so I found this extremely beneficial. The one problem I have is that my physical location is in a "census-designated place (CDP)" right next to a large city. When people search locally they put in the larger city not my CDP. Because I'm sticking that larger city name in when and where I can, I do show up, but not as well as I'd like. Wherever my actual address is listed it has that CDP since that's the physical and mailing address (coming from directories, Google Maps, etc.).
And being a home-based business, I have to agree with Marcus. But even though I'm not comfortable using my street address I do so because of SEO. I decided to choose better local SEO over possible privacy issues. So far it hasn't been a problem. I do wish there was some way around this, and there should be considering the continuing increase in home-based businesses.
Tons of great info in the post itself AND in the comments.
Thanks all! Can't wait to go share this post.
I have not personally dealt with building citations for Local SEO for a long time. I do other things to boost ranking and citations are not as important as they once were. But they are definitely still important, especially for newer businesses or ones that have moved or have fractured upstream data.
Thanks Rand and again big congrats on adding GetListed and David to the team.
Great score!
Hey Linda,
I'm curious to hear why you think citations are less important than they once were. Are you talking about how things changed when the blended algorithm rolled out? Now that links and onsite factors are playing a roll in the local rankings?
Hey Darren, well I was painting with a bit of a broad brush but...
Ya in part that's what I meant. The biggest ranking impact citations have IMO is on the old pack algo which is showing up less and less. The current ranking order is mainly based on organic ranking factors, again just IMO.
That doesn't mean citations aren't important. But in my particular case I was always working with mature businesses, they already HAD a ton of citations. They maybe weren't getting credit for them because NAP was wrong on their Place page. So by correcting NAP on Place page I helped them align with the 3,000 citations they already had. So then I focused my efforts more on on-site SEO which is where I could always get a really big ranking boost!
So my feeling is citations are really important and you need a strong base of them so if new biz then need to build them for sure. But if dealing with a mature business that already has a bunch of strong citations - then in that case I think time spent on on-site SEO can move the needle a lot more than adding more citations would.
BUT again everything is relative, depends on the situation and if there is plenty of time and money to do it all - then ideally do it all. Do great on-site, great G+L opt, keep adding lots of citations and have a great review strategy!
Anybody know why when I tried to follow the suggestion from Rand to find the listings excluding my own website I put in -site:endeavourcottage.co.uk but I get no results. Must be doing something wrong?
This looks correct to me. A similar search excluding my own URL seems to work fine. I assume you also tried the search without the exclusion just to make sure there actually were results for the key phrases you were searching on (?)
Yes I did try without the - and I and I get tons of results but they're all my own website pages are, site:endeavourcottage.co.uk . I've also tried it on other websites and there is something wrong. Any idea anybody? Not that important just a little bit frustrating.
Maybe this was happen just for your search query. the - operator only remove the search phrase which will come after it. I checked a search query " Whitby holiday cottages" keyword and I got the right result on Google Search. You can try this search query to check it Whitby holiday cottages -site:endeavourcottage.co.uk If you are still facing the same issue please review the search operator. https://www.googleguide.com/minus_operator.html
Great post Rand !! Specially the point about finding gold on the 5th and 6th page.
Btw. have you tried using RankWatch to track google local rankings ? We are the only tool that will check rankings within Locals results.
Thoughts on using a service like www.UBL.org to do the citation work for you? (If they are a competitor of getlisted.org I apologize I didn't see services like UBL.org listed on getlisted.org).
Or should this be done by a SEO consultant?
Thanks!
Ryan H.
nice post....!
Great idea about the job sites - Simply Hired and Indeed have a pretty high DA and should be counted as important unstructured citations. I'd also search in Google for business name and phone number, since an address may have several versions (Street, St., Str.)
Google: "SEOmoz (206) 812-2232 -site:seomoz.org"
David Mihm asked about SEER's excellent article:
Catching Up with your Local Competitors & Automating Citation Discovery
Few more articles that anyone interested in local SEO should check:
Hardcore Local SEO Tactics – SMX Advanced 2012
Using Local SERP Checker for Local Links and Citations Prospecting
The Most Important Local Business Directories for SEO
Wow... the acquisition spree is on!
Yeh Rand is doing what he planned when SEOmoz got the 18 mil funding i.e. acquire businesses !!
**UPDATE** I probably misinterpreted Rand's comments. My apologies.
My Original comment:
Good stuff here overall (especially in comments) but wanted to raise one concern: recommending use of broad categories *exclusively* can be bad advice. The categories you should be using can heavily depend on what the business does/is good at, what type of customer they want, and the accuracy/depth of Google's category taxonomy. Sometimes they just don't have a broad category that really describes the service you provide or want to highlight as a specialty.
Love the growth of local-focused content on Moz!
I think Rand's just suggesting going broad in your competitive analysis for citation finding, not going broad on your actual listings. I believe he's just pointing out that if you go broad you'll find more citation opportunities.
What's the aural equivalent of tunnel-vision? This is why you get to be Darren Freaking Shaw, sir :D
@Rand - Please pardon the misinterpretation.
Great WBF Rand! Check out my profile page on seomoz.org thanks for the tip on unstructured citations ;)
Nice WBF Rand. My favorite bit was to always include your business name and address and phone number even on social sites that don't have a formal profile structure that asks for that information. That's a great tip and I'm off to make sure that information is in our profiles for various other sites we use for videos like DotSub.com. Thanks!
Great share. Have got few clues out of the thoughts you have shared.
Few problems I can share in terms of the local seo. How many days it take to reach the activation PIN to the customer? Is it necessary to educate the customers as how important the PIN is. I found some of the customers hardly care about the local listing validation Pin. And they say, they havent got the pin. It becomes more difficult when you are operating from overseas.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks
Sekhar.