Making sure that your business is getting seen by your local community is extremely important. Your citation is key to local search engine optimization, and it should away be same. Let have a look into how and why to get citations.
Free Listings If your just starting up online and you need citations this should be the first place you go to. If you have the time list your business on as many local citations you can find. These are sites like Yellowpages.com, Yahoo, 411.com, Anywho, Infospace, and dozens of others. There is no reason why you would not take advantage of these free listings. If your able to provide Google with allot of these citation then the Big G will know your business is real and will happily show you on th efront page of google.
Search terms for local Keywords Next you need to determine what keywords potential customer would search by to find your business. Don’t worry about local listings on Google Pages. Instead, scroll down to the bottom where you will find related businesses. Take advantage of these businesses who may offer free listings for their niche.
Analyze Your Competition If you see that your competition is ranking above you in your local listings, the first thing you should consider is that he/she has a larger citation base. Start by analyzing the competitions site. There are a massive amount of tools online that will allow you to utilize this.
If you don’t want to use these tools then you can manually do it on google maps. Use a search term that would be used to find your business and their business. Look to the right for the “more info” link – click and you will find yourself on the listing’s details including nearby places, review, etc. Look at the bottom and see “more about this page.” Below that is a group of links. Each of these is where Google found a citation for that business. Of course click on the site and try to also list your business on these pages.
Then again you could use one of the newer, quicker methods, which does basically the same thing except it automates the process for you and creates a nice easy to follow list of where your competition has citations along with any important data you should know about. Of course you will want to repeat the process for every competitor you have.
Citation Services There are many citation services that will do your citation work for you. These will cost you money but of course save you time as you will not be doing anything. All these services have different size packages and you may choose depending on how hard your competition is. While you do have to pay for this service, it also saves you a great deal of time, and time is money.
Placing above your competition is very important to the revenue flow of your business. The competition that sits above you in a local search will get the traffic before you will. It’s human nature. Most searchers start with the top listing and work their way down. That’s also why it’s important to have a consistent citation that web searchers will begin to recognize.
Citations are very important to your business so be sure to give them the attention they deserve. Of course allot of business and even seo experts look over these little citations and they really never get any attentsion.
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