Are you lately coming across this new type of service called ‘citation building service’ offered by the SEO companies? As far as SEO is concerned this is a fairly new type of service when compared to services that are known to us such as article submissions, directory listings and so on. The question is whether your website needs this service or is this just yet another fancy term created by the search engine optimization industry to make money? Here are few important benefits that you need to know before coming up with your verdict.

Changing Search Engine Ranking Algorithms

Someone who has been trying to promote their business in top search engines like Google would have certainly noticed how the search engine ranking algorithms have been changing in the past, year after year. If you continue to use the ranking techniques that you used five years ago today, the chances of your website getting the expected level of visibility are very bleak. This forces one to constantly change and adapt their ranking strategies to be in line with the latest Google ranking algorithm. Regardless of whether you are targeting local market or international market, it is essential for a business to have good visibility for local searches. Local citation building service is developed to effectively meet this Google ranking parameter. If you do not work on citation building, you are likely to miss out on many of the advantages that it brings to your website and to your brand.

Reasons why you take advantage of citation building

1. Building trust – The only way you could make your prospective leads choose your brand over the other competing brands is by winning their trust. One of the most important criteria here is to show them that you are a real business and not just a fictitious name. With the help of citation building service, you will be able to get your business listed in Google Maps listings along with your physical address.
2. Ease of access – When customers want to reach you they should be able to do that easily without having to waste time digging your contact information. Building citations with the help of Local citation building service will ensure your visitors find your contact information easily without even having to visit your website directly from the search results. Your customers will also be able to find out easily about your business hours and other such useful information.
3. Better online visibility – The general visibility level of your website will improve dramatically when the citations are built correctly.
4. Strong local presence – You will be able to leverage the benefits of local listings. It is a lot easier to get your website listed for local results using geographic quantifiers such as city name, street name and building name.

These are just some of the cursory benefits of the many benefits that you are likely to enjoy with carefully built local citations. Make sure you are hiring the best people for the job.

Local search is a perfect way for search engines to provide the most relevant results to users that are calculated according to your particular location. In fact, you might be surprised that 7 billion monthly unique local searches take place on Google in the US alone; that’s a pretty decent conversion rate no matter how you slice the data.

Local listing marketing is also a great tool that works well for small businesses, as the competition is much smaller in local areas. This means, the better visibility you have on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), the more likely someone will click and convert on your site.

Usually, local search results are displayed in one of two ways on Google – the new Google carousel or in a listing format. The carousel format comprises of organic and paid listings and also includes a map plotted with local destination. In addition to an indented list makes it easy for you and your clients to know the important details of a particular product or service right away – like physical address, contact number, and customer reviews.

If you are thinking about listing your business locally, here are a few ways how local listings works very well for small businesses:

Claim Your Business –
Just like browsing a dedicated site on Google and signing in, creating a local page is quite easy. You only need to type in the name of your business. Rest assured that, claiming your business in the local market will help you reach your prospective audience.

Categorize Your Business –
Through locally listing your small business, you will need to categorize your type of business. While creating your business page, you will need to choose a primary category.
Search engines have been known to not display a particular business if it’s not categorized. If your business is categorized, you will need to choose your primary category and choose up to nine additional categories for your business.

Consistency –
Always make sure that your business is listed consistently across the web. This implies the name, address and photo number – always known as NAP data should be same, when it comes to your local accounts directory listings or any other listings of your business.
Quality and Quantity –
It’s highly suggested that you need to make sure that your business has a local listing in some of the highest quality directories on the web. To improve your quantity, you should do search for both categories and geographic terms to see if there is somewhere you should be listed.

Reviews –
Reviews are often showcased at the right side on a SERP. However, you can’t do much to your reviews, but by working to get more reviews in general should give you a healthy ratio of accurate appraisals. Google will look at reviews as a ranking factor, when it comes to local listings.

Inbound Links –
Apart from local citations, you will earn a good number of quality inbound links from authoritative sources. These links can come from any sources – like newspapers, local business indexes, bloggers, etc. Through social sharing, content development and local listings, you can increase the number of inbound links

On-page Optimization –
Once the local listings of your small business are done, make sure you’re using every chance to make it look attractive. However, you can post appealing photos and make sure the description is keyword-rich – which tells your clients what you’re all about. Finally, make sure everything is filled out – operational hours, address, contact information etc.

Conclusion –
It’s highly suggested that local listings can work well for small businesses. Hence, start the process of local listings today and enjoy benefits of staying atop of SERP today.

Are you sabotaging your Google rankings?

This might be the biggest headache of many search engine experts. This is because many of the times they don’t focus on local SEO. Now you must be wondering what the fuss is with local SEO?

Well, local seo is establishing a brand recognition in local search results. And this is quite different from your average seo campaigns. To drive local seo campaigns successfully, citations plays an important role.

Citation means any mention of a business on the web with or without a link. A complete local citation include company name, phone number and a valid address. Any citation without any of these can be considered as a partial citation.

Well citation can be categorised as:

Structured citations!

These are the mention of your business at business websites meant for this purpose only like yellowpages.com, yelp or superpages.com.

Unstructured citations!

Mention of your business at blogging websites, newspaper websites, event listing websites or event at job listing sites is considered as unstructured citation. This unstructured citation can be really helpful for your local search engine ranking factors.

Not all citations are created equal!

Remember there is a huge difference in the value of different citations. A mention of your business at yellow pages is far more valuable that the mention at any spammy website that you find in the results of some search query like citation sites for usa.

Building citations only are not important, but it is super important that you are careful with where you submit. You never know which citation listing is going to help you or which is harmful for your rankings. So while performing citation, first decide the quality of the citation source and then make a citation.

To decide the quality of a citation source, consider the following:

Is it a part of a network?

There exist some business listing networks, which create a business submission to dozens, or sometimes hundreds or to even more additional domains when you create only one submission. This way you can get a massive link spike from these low quality directory sites but actually hurt your SEO rankings. You can determine it by looking for some footprints(especially in footer) on the site that is appearing on other sites as well. Make a google search for the footprint in double quotes and you will find all the other sites similar to that.

Number of Indexed pages:

To determine the number of indexed pages make a search for “site:www.domain.com” and if the number of indexed pages is low (typically less than 100) then it is a red flag. You should not consider that site for your business submission.

Check if the homepage title is ranking or not?

A website’s homepage title typically have the brand name in it. Perform a search for the brand name. If the site is not ranking on the first page even on its brand name then definitely it is a red flag for you.

The domain authority:

Ideally, the DA for a website should be more than 30 for you to submit your business to.

So these are some quality checks one should perform before performing local citation for your business. Otherwise you can witness a number of low quality ranks for your brand.

Want to get your business listed in Google’s local 3-pack?

Unfortunately, there’s no hack for an instant 3-pack listing (wouldn’t that be nice!). That means local businesses must rely on good local SEO for greater online visibility.

Local SERPs are extremely competitive. In addition, Google has made some changes that make it harder than ever to stay visible (e.g., the mobile 3-packs now featuring paid ads that push down organic results).

The good news?

Making a few easy improvements to your local SEO will have a tangible impact on your organic search rankings.

Here are eight easy hacks that you can start using today to boost your short- and long-term local SEO efforts.

1. Simulate Local Search During Keyword Research

Every good SEO campaign starts with keyword research, which – for most people – means turning to Google’s free tool, Keyword Planner. If you need generic keyword ideas, this tool is a gem.

However, ever since Google killed its location search filter back in December 2015, simulating local search results from a different city has become a lot more complicated. You can’t just add a location to your keyword because that creates an entirely different SERP (e.g. searching for “pizza” from NYC and “pizza New York” from San Diego will return radically different results).

To compensate, most SEOs now do one of three things:

Add the “near” parameter to their URL: After typing in a query they modify the URL by adding “&near=cityname.” This draws results as if you’d searched from near that location.

Use the “uule” parameter: You can append each search with a base64 encoded form of the “Canonical Name” of a location called the “uule” parameter.

Use software to target specific GPS coordinates: Letting an algorithm geotarget your keywords via GPS coordinates is by far the easiest and most accurate solution. Check out this list of software solutions for local rank checking.

Once you’ve landed on your keywords, it’s time to put your research to work. Create content that targets keywords with low competition, and don’t forget to add them to your anchor text and HTML tags.

2. Capitalize on Easy Link Building Opportunities

According to a recent survey, link signals (i.e., inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, number of links, etc.) account for 29 percent of ranking factors, making them the most important ranking factor to consider. That means link building should be one of your top local SEO priorities.

Unfortunately, building organic links takes time. You need a repertoire of valuable content that influencers want to click on before you can truly take advantage of link building opportunities. Look for opportunities to collaborate with influencers and find other ways to build your brand reputation online.

SEO experts recently shared their experience and local-focused tactics with my team’s new link building survey. Here’s where they successfully and efficiently built links within the past 12 months:

Local business websites (77 percent)

Yelp and similar directories (80 percent)

Local press (83 percent)

Chambers of commerce (70 percent)

One of the best ways to score some quick, high-quality backlinks is to help site owners find and fix broken links in their content. Simply scour high-ranking posts in your niche for broken links, let the site owner know if you find any, and then offer up your website as a substitute.

Forty-three percent of SEOs interviewed used broken link building within the past 12 months, and it proved to be one of the easiest and most efficient ways to new backlinks.

3. Use Competitor Research to Discover More Backlink Opportunities

Competitor research is a great way to find out which domains are linking to your rival businesses, but leaving you out in the cold. Turn to your favorite competitor tracking tool and use it to discover link building opportunities that you might have overlooked:

Figure out which sites link to more than one of your competitors, but don’t link to you.

Determine the relative domain authority of each of these sites (your competitor analysis tool should give you this information).

Make a list of the most influential and relevant domains.

Perform link outreach to the domains on your list.

4. Weed out NAP Inconsistencies

It’s important that your NAP (name, address, and phone number) remains consistent on every website it’s listed on. Use rank tracking software to monitor your citations and if you ever find NAP inconsistencies, contact the site owners or directories in question and ask them to correct the mistake.

According to the study cited above, on-page signals including NAP are the second to third most important ranking signals for both local pack rankings and localized organic rankings.

5. Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

Your Google My Business page is easily the most important ranking factor when it comes to local pack ranking, and optimizing it is easy. Here’s what you have to do:

Claim your listing (here’s how).

Verify your account.

Ensure your business details are up-to-date. Common mistakes include wrong opening hours, erroneous opening hours, and incorrect category listings.

Link to your website.

Upload high-quality business images (or refresh existing images if they’re more than a year old).

Once your Google My Business page is set up, the best way to keep optimizing is to win customer reviews and build citations for local listings.

6. Curate Customer Proof

Social proof is among the most powerful content at your disposal. Reviews, testimonials, and case studies are both powerful ranking signal (7-13 percent) and persuasive pieces of copy that often decide whether a customer hires you or one of your competitors.

Getting customer proof takes a little work, but here are a few creative ways to encourage more reviews:

Offer link building opportunities: Your customers want to build links just as badly as you do, and many will leap at the opportunity to be featured in a case study if it means free publicity. Don’t have time to build a case study yourself? Websites like Case Study Buddy can help.

Incentivize reviews with giveaways: Consider giving discount codes, gift cards, and raffle tickets for bigger prizes away whenever a customer reviews your business. Restaurants and retails stores especially excel at this!

Ask for reviews: Yes, it really can be this simple. You won’t win reviews from all of your customers, but all you need is a trickle of positive feedback on the platforms your customers frequent (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Amazon, etc.) and you’ll soon build up a solid reputation.

7. Don’t Forget About Structured Data Markup

You’ll need to use structured data markup if you want your business to appear in the local Knowledge Graph panel on the right side of Google’s SERPs. It also lets you provide visitors with a rich snippet that gives them information like your NAP and positive reviews.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to use different markups for different platforms. For example, you should use Schema for Google search results, but you’ll need Open Graph for social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

The hack? There’s software available (and relatively easy to find) that will let you manage all your markups from one central hub.

8. Track Video & Image Ranking

While most businesses measure metrics like visitors and CTR, surprisingly few realize that quality rank tracking software can also check your video and image rankings.

Check your rank tracking tool for an option to enable universal search results, and your software should gather results from search engines like YouTube as well as Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Optimizing images is often as simple as compressing your images to reduce their file size. Make sure your images are properly formatted (usually .jpg or .png) and then compressed with a tool that preserves image quality.

To improve your videos, optimize your titles and metadata to be more clickable and include at least one keyword, creating unique thumbnails, and transcribe your video text to help YouTube’s indexing.

How to Get Started

Kick off your SEO campaign with local SEO basics – do some keyword research, create a Google My Business listing, perform competitor analysis, and then start planning out a few targeted landing pages. Start small and prioritize your SEO to focus on the most important local ranking signals first.

There’s plenty of time to dive into more advanced SEO once you’ve mastered these eight hacks.