Local citations are an important factor if you are using local seo to rank you site for traffic. So, just what are local citations, anyways?

A local citation is any mention of your name, address and phone number online. It tells: Google consider you local, relevant and real, which is important because they are all about catching people who are trying to game the system.

When you are building your site you should focus on building at least 20 local citations to begin with. This would really help you with your rankings and with Google My Business (GMB) and with maps.

So, what are the guidelines for building citations? Well, the first rule is to ALWAYS ONLY do ALL the citations exactly the same.

Did I say that strong enough? I’m not sure I did. I mean EXACTLY the same. Don’t put Main Street one time and Main St. another. I hope you’re getting this. They should be the SAME, everytime.

If it is different, your site won’t get the benefits of building these local citations. It’s only beneficial if the information is consistent across all your citations.

There are two great ways you can find local citations (or places to put your citations).

The first one is a free and easy method. Good old google.com. Just go to the search engine and put in your own industry and location. This is where you want to rank ultimately and is also where you can see your competition. These listings are the sites that ARE currently ranking.

One by one, copy their phone number and business name and paste them in Google and hit search. (Make sure there are no spaces in the phone number.) The results will show places where your competitor has managed to list his business name and phone number. The goal here is to find places your competitors are using to get listings. Genius, right?

Try to add your listing here as well. Look at all the results for each of your competitors and see if you can get a listing on the same sites or pages.

If you do just a Google search with at least two or three of you competitors you should easily come up with a minimum of 20 citations for your website.

This is a very good technique to get very good backlinks, as well as improve your rankings in local searches while getting citations.

Now we will move to the next method, and that is paying us to do this for you. Not only will we help you get your basic citations done, we can also help you know how many you need to have to do more than your competitors and create the links for you. You can find out more about our done for you local citation services here.

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