Despite business listings (also known as citations) decreasing in their ranking importance, reaching customers in the right places—and ensuring that they’re presented with accurate information—is still essential for any local business.
Correct and consistent listings offer you more visibility online and improve local rankings—meaning more traffic and more sales. If you are new to this topic, then check out our guide on local citations!
If you’re running a B&B in Upstate New York, you’d obviously want to be listed on the big key directory sites like Tripadvisor. But to reach as many people as possible, you’d also want to appear on any niche B&B directories that you might not have heard of, but your customers have.
So the big question is…how do you find out about those niche listings directories?
This is where our Citation Tracker tool comes in, which is designed to work seamlessly with our Listings Management toolkit. Not only does it make light work of trawling the web to find all existing citations (and check for inconsistencies!), but it also shows you the citations you don’t have—meaning new opportunities!
In this post, I’ll go through two ways of using Citation Tracker to find new business listings in order to improve your business’s online visibility and rankings.
1. Key Citations
Once you’ve run your Citation Tracker report, you’ll see a tab called Key Citations. This is where you’ll see the most valuable and important citation sites found in your country, based on your location and business type:
Beneath the charts at the top, you’ll see the ‘Key Citations’ table, which shows you the NAP data (if any) found for each citation site.
Any key citation site that your business isn’t currently listed on will have a ‘Get Citation’ button (the ‘+’ icon) next to it:
This links directly to the directory/site in question, so you can immediately go and create a new listing.
2. Competitor Citations
Citation Tracker also shows you the citations that your competitors have but you don’t, and highlights any gaps that need filling.
In your Citation Tracker report, you’ll see a tab called ‘Competitor Citations’. Here you’ll be able to see the list of citations and business mentions for your top five competitors, excluding any citations you’ve already claimed:
To discover who your competitors are, simply click on the red pins:
For a better understanding of the citations that are worth you registering for, take a look at the Citation Authority and Citation Value columns:
Citation Authority is based on Domain Authority, a metric calculated by Moz. It’s a prediction of its ability to rank well in search engines, calculated out of 100. The higher the number, the more influence that site may have.
Citation Value is unique to BrightLocal. It’s determined using the frequency with which a website appears in citation records. The more a website is used as a citation source, the higher its value. These values are calculated from unique research conducted by BrightLocal, and you should go after any showing high Citation Value scores first.
In the column called ‘Actions’, click the ‘+’ icon and you’ll be taken straight to the citation site. Once there, you should be able to fill in your business details to register a citation request. Keep in mind that your citation may not be added to a directory immediately.
And that’s it—two easy ways to get new business listings with Citation Tracker!
If you’d like to share your own tips and secrets about Citation Tracker (or any of the other BrightLocal tools), head to the comments and tell us, or email us at [email protected] if you’ve got a particularly compelling story to share.
Want to give Citation Tracker a try? Grab a 14-day free trial and see what’s possible.
