How to Build Online Citations For Local Business SEO
Modern business owners need to increase their online visibility if they want to remain profitable for long. Now that the era of social distancing has shut down many in-person operations, digital commerce is the only thing that many business owners have left to make a living for themselves. Unfortunately, the newfound importance of the internet for commercial purposes is still poorly understood by many entrepreneurs, largely because they’re unfamiliar with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
Building online citations for your local business is of the utmost importance if you want customers to find you with ease. Here’s a review of how you can do that successfully.
The three major factors
There are three major factors that most modern search engines take into consideration after users input a query into them with the hopes of finding accurate results. Modern search engines want to know if your website is relevant, meaning it contains key words that are likely to resonate with customers. They also want to know the proximity of your business to the digital user in question – they don’t want to show results for a business that’s on the other side of the world, after all. Finally, search engines also want to know about the prominence of your webpage, which entails how many users it has and whether those users are legitimate or simply bots pretending to be people.
Investing in SEO expertise like that possessed by Yeah! Local can help you master the SEO process, but business owners will always have to learn a little bit about this process themselves if they truly want to attain success. After all, you’re the one responsible for your prosperity at the end of the day, and you can’t outsource everything to someone else. So, how do you build online citations to bolster your business’ SEO performance?
An online citation is simply a reference to your business that’s included on someone else’s website. They don’t necessarily have to entail a backlink, or a literal link that will deliver users to one of your webpages, but having many backlinks on good websites is generally considered a good SEO strategy. Knowing how Google’s local algorithm works can help you navigate the complexity of modern search engines, but only by building citations can you really get the word out about your business.
Try hard to get your business’ NAP (name, address, and phone number) on as many local directories as possible. Also try to include your business’ NAP in industry-specific directories that will point others towards your company. Before long, you’ll be improving your SEO expertise and will find more customers visiting your website or pouring through your doors.
