If you’re familiar with link building, you may fear citation building is similarly time-consuming, challenging, and frustrating.
Luckily, it’s not quite as resource-draining as link building. In fact, building and managing local citations is easy to get to grips with. Though it’s not complex, the actual time taken to build citations can be a barrier, which is where listing management tools can come in handy. More on that later.
A citation is a mention of your business information shared online. Citation building is simply the process of creating more of these citations across the web.
The best kinds of mentions include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP), along with any supplementary information that may be relevant. This could be your opening hours, web address, or email, depending on where the mention is going to exist online.
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You could have built local citations without even realizing it, such as through:
- Social media profiles
- Directory listings
- Event listings
- Review profiles
- Articles
- Aggregators or booking websites
Each accurate, high-quality citation is a valuable piece of your local SEO strategy.
Because of this, many purposefully set out to grow their current profile by searching for local directories, niche industry sites, social media platforms, and so on, to share their business details. This process, though time-consuming, is well worth it, which is why many businesses choose to utilize citation-building tools in order to create a robust portfolio across the web (without spending hours creating it).
Related: How to Master Local Link Building – Free Online Course
How many should you aim to build?
As with links, there’s no magic number that you should target. It’s more often helpful to focus instead on consistently building as many good quality, accurate citations as possible.
The bigger your pool of high-quality, accurate, and consistent mentions, the better for your search visibility and consumer discovery.
That being said, the more citations you have, the harder they are to keep track of—dozens of citations do nothing if they all contain outdated, mismatched information. Citation tracking methods and tools come in handy for this exact reason.
Another helpful tip is to benchmark your count against your competitors. We know citations are a top local search ranking factor, so you should aim for as many local citations—if not more—as your biggest competitor.
Overall, building and managing high-quality, accurate citations is a key building block of your local SEO strategy. Luckily, you can find a host of tools to help maximize the benefit of the process.