4 Ways to Improve Your Local Citations

SEO is one of the essentials of getting your name out there and providing the right information to clients.

But the SEO domain is so huge, with each particular sub-niche of the SEO having varying efficiency and success at getting your name out there.

A predominant SEO aspect that every business owner should consider when looking to advertise their business online is the use of local citations.

Self-explanatory, MOZ, describes local citations as listings of your businesses’ name, address, and number.

Why Do Local Citations Matter

Even if your business does not receive links from the business directories or social media platforms, local citations will help at improving the search rankings of your brand. More importantly, these citations will establish your business as part of the local community, and this will help to build trust with the potential customers.

As it follows, improving your local citations will have the effect of improving search traffic and credibility.

So, how do I improve my citations?

Well, read on as we explore the top 4 ways you can use to improve your local citations.

• Verify NAP Consistency

Reiterating to what we mentioned above, there are three essential components of a local citation, and these components include Name, Address, and Phone number, also known as NAP.

Sure, there are other components of local citations such as business categories, operating hours, emails addresses, fax number, reviews, attributes, payments methods, and more. However, NAP offers a more solid description of your business, and hence its popularity.

In fact, NAP will not only help at accurately describing your business, but it similarly improves on your local search engine results. This is because search engines such as Google will use the data on NAP to assist in geo-targeted searches.

And now this brings us to the consistency of your NAP. Now, if your NAP has some inconsistencies across the various listings, search engines will find it challenging to geo-target your business.

To avoid such confusion, you must ensure that your NAP is consistent everywhere. This is to mean if your NAP is:

Houston Car Rental

Able Road 65483

Houston, TX 6789

(832) 555-6666

Then the same exact Nap should appear as-is on every other of your listings. Some of the common forms of inconsistencies with NAP include referring Street to ST. Texas to TX.

You should always ensure that your NAP is consistent across all your listings.

• Get Cited

Obviously, you’ll need to get cited for advertising your business.

But with such a huge inventory of listing sites and options, this can get a bit challenging.

The good news is, you can hire some citation builders to build your local citations and get them listed.

For a start, however, you get yourself going by exploring some of the popular citation offerings such as;

• Yelp
• Angie’s List
• Better Business Bureau

• Get Local Links

Local citations, like on-page SEO, is within your jurisdiction. However, you can get the local citations to work to your advantage by working them in tandem with links from local sources.

Equally as important as reviews you’ll get from Yelp or any other local listing, getting local citations will greatly improve your marketing endeavors, boost your local search visibility as well as improve your credibility on the online platform.

• Get Tools of Trade

Time is a precious commodity, especially when it comes to marketing.

Rather than spending time scouring the internet for all your business citations created for your business, you can use web tools to make your work easier.

Some of the tools that you should consider using include:

• Moz Local
• Express Update
• Local Site Summit

Conclusion

Local citations are the key to the growth of your business.  Local citations will help to drive enormous amounts of traffic to your business and ease your advertising expenses.