Citations

Citation Building Services

What is a Citation?

A Citation is a mention of your business information that is on the internet in the form of:

  • Your Company Name
  • Your Company Address
  • Your Company Phone Number

This is referred as NAP (Name, Address, Phone) in the SEO world. Citations are one the main factors in helping your business rank in the Google Places listings. Google sees Citations as an importance factor of your company. More mentions shows more importance. Citations from high quality directories carry more weight than those from low quality directories.

It is very important that your Citations on the internet are accurate and up to date. Having mistakes and inconsistent Citations as well as duplicate Citations are viewed as a negative from Google and your rankings will reflect that.

What is Google Places?

Google Places, formally known as Local 7 Map, are a set of results of businesses listed on Google maps, specific to the keywords and location of the keywords being searched for.

Ranking in the Google Places results can make a huge increase to the traffic you are generating from organic search alone.

Additionally it makes it MUCH easier for your customers to find you!

Below is an example of exactly what a local map listing is and how the local search layout is currently working in Google:

Local Map Seo Canada

 

The top few results and results on the right-side column (in the red boxes) are paid ads through Google’s Adwords program. These can be effective, but many people tend to avoid clicking them (possibly due to the idea that because a listing is paid for, it may not be the most relevant to their search).

Typically for local searches, there are 3 organic results below the sponsored ads (in the green box), but at times the map pack (in the yellow box) could be directly below the sponsored ads and above the organic content.

Ranking organically (green box) and ranking in the local map pack (yellow) require two totally different strategies.

There are advantages of each of the two types of listings, but the map listing is especially important for someone looking for a product or service that is in a specific location (and typically for someone who is looking for that product or service close to their home or work).

It is possible to have a listing in both the organic results and in the Google Places, and we almost always advise business owners to obtain both these listings as it greatly increases the amount of traffic generated to your website.

Citation Building

  • Custom Campaigns built uniquely for your business, your city, and your niche.
  • Full Citation Audit (A citation is an online reference to your business name, address, and phone number, NAP. Google uses them to determine the authority of your local business.)
  • Citation Building
  • Google My Business / Bing Local Listing and Optimization
  • Classified Submissions

Our Process

1. Full Citation Audit

tour-big-auditThe first step in getting your goals is knowing where to start. This is why we put every campaign through a detailed, intensive Citation Audit. We catalog and report both correct and incorrect citations, avoiding any duplication of efforts. We develop a detailed report which gives us a road map on how to repair incorrect citations with effectiveness.

 2. Local Citation Building

tour-big-localLocal Directory Citations are the cornerstone of Local SEO. We manually submit to the Best directories for your niche. Every single campaign is unique and we utilize the best strategies for determining the proper directories for each client.

 3. Rich Media Citations

tour-big-rich-mediaHere we use Video and GEO – tagged Photo strategies to create high authority links and citations. We submit the videos to the top video hosting sources and the photos to the top image hosting sources, giving you powerful citations.

 4. Social Citations

tour-big-socialHaving social citations is another strategy we use to get legit, high authority links and citations. Social Media is a very important piece to the Local SEO citation building process.

Citation Repair

Citation Repairs are needed for a number of reasons:

  • You move your business to a new location
  • You change the business phone number
  • The business name changes
  • Incorrect information was submitted to local directories and they entered the wrong NAP.

Citation repairing is a very tedious and manual process which requires a lot of time with contacting each site to give them the proper information. On average, we will be able to correct 70-90% of the wrong Citations that we find. This is because some sites are no longer active or we can’t reach the website owners to correct the Citation (these are generally weaker Citations and do not affect rankings as much).

We take the stress away from you by offering a Citation Cleanup Service:

  • Complete A Full Citation Audit For Your Business
  • Locate All of The Incorrect Information
  • Contact Each Citation Source Individually
  • Repair All Incorrect Citations
  • Provide A Detailed Comprehensive Citation Report

This service will give you the best opportunity to rank in the Google Places Listings so you will have more eyes seeing your business.

It is extremely important that the lines of communications are open during the Citation Repair process. Phone verification is often needed and additional contact is required to verify the listings. We will ensure that you are updated in every sense of the process and kept in the loop.

Visit our Contact Page or click the button below to give us a call on your phone:

Swan Media Solutions Inc.