The Importance of Citation Management for Businesses
One of the most important and consistent factors that affect search ranking performance for websites is the quality and number of citations that a business has. I am not necessarily talking about links to websites, a citation is defined as a mention of your business name, address and telephone number (NAP) on another website. An example might be a Facebook business page or an entry on yell.com and even the local business association such as the Federation of Small Business.
It is generally accepted that Google and Bing search robots will crawl the web and look for references of your business and attempt to connect them all together through complex links and identify your website as being the same. It is for this reason that the accuracy of the NAP is essential. We often find our reports that track citations miss references to businesses because they had the wrong phone number for even postcode recorded. If our reports can’t find you you can be sure Google will miss it too and you don’t get the credit.
You also need to be aware of duplicate Google+ business listings. There are very serious potential consequences if you have duplicate listings. In the US Google is played by spam business listings and they come down hard on suspects. Duplication of listing is a negative factor and can be treated as spam bringing both listings down in rankings.
The other important thing to consider is the quality of any citations. Facebook is seen as a high quality citation but for niche businesses there are lots of smaller specialist directories that you can get listed on that can prove very beneficial. So when you look at the ranking performance for your website against competitors you might want to think about what citations they have that you don’t.
Now it can be difficult to discover exactly which citations your business is listed on. We provide a full citation management service and can run reports either ad-hoc or monthly and check both you and your competitors citations. We can add citations to directories on your behalf and keep check of any new ones that you should be on. Find out more here Citation Management Service
There is no doubt that effective citation management can dramatically improve your business search engine ranking.