How local citations can help with your business
It’s not easy to find the right local citation for your business. There are many business directories out there that claim to be the best but when it comes to your business, not all of them will be effective.
What are local citations?
Local citations are listings that appear on directories like Yelp, Google My Business, Foursquare and more. These listing sites typically show up at or near the top of search results for certain keywords and phrases. For example, if someone searches for “pizza restaurants” on Google Maps, then they’ll see local businesses on the map as well as nearby places like pizzerias, fast food chains and other food joints that serve pizza.
Why should you care about local citations?
There are two main reasons why you should care about local citations: they help people find you online and they increase your SEO ranking. When someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase on Google or Bing (like “best pizza restaurants in London”), then those businesses will appear at the top of their search results.
Here are some ways local citations can help with your business:
Improves Search Engine Rankings
The first and most obvious benefit of having a good set of citations is that it can help improve your search engine rankings. Google and other search engines use local citations as an indication of how important a company or brand is in its area. This means that if you have a high number of citations in your area then this will help you rank higher on Google and other search engines when someone searches for keywords related to your services or products.
Gets More Traffic To Your Business
Citations help build traffic to your website by driving people directly from search engines like Google and Bing straight to your website. This also helps increase direct traffic through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter because people sharing links on these platforms will also link directly to websites instead of just using text links which normally bring less traffic than others.
They help with your SEO.
The first thing to know about local citations is that they’re essentially references to your business that appear on other websites. For example, if you own a flower shop and you want to get more customers, you could ask a local newspaper to mention your store in an article about local flower shops. When someone searches for “flowers” on Google or Bing, their search results will include both sites with links to specific flower shops — along with any articles mentioning those shops.
Local citations also help with mobile optimization.
Since Google began using mobile-friendliness as an indicator of whether or not a site should rank well in search results, the way people access the internet has changed significantly — especially when it comes to shopping. More than 50% of all eCommerce traffic now comes from mobile devices (and this number will only continue growing), which means that if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you may be missing out on potential revenue by not showing up in organic search results when someone searches for products or services on their phone. Local citations can help combat this problem by helping you optimize for both desktop and mobile use cases. You can find more here at the website.
