A local citation is any mention of your business’s name, address, and phone number online. Many SEOs believe they’re a key ranking factor for local SEO.
Citations appear in lots of different places: business directories, social networks—anywhere someone might be looking for information about local businesses.
Here’s an example of one for a coffee shop in New York:
1 citation example 1
This is known as a NAP citation because it shows the shop’s name, address, and phone number.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
Why local citations are important
What types of citations there are
How to get citations
Why consistency and accuracy matter
Why are citations important?
Citations are useful for two main things:
Ranking higher for local search queries (maybe)
Helping people discover your business online
How citations help with local SEO
Citations are believed to help search engines verify the existence, legitimacy, and trustworthiness of your business. If the same details appear across many relevant and trusted websites, then Google likely has increased confidence that your business exists, is operational, and that what you say about it is true.
According to a survey by Moz, citations are the fifth most important ranking signal for local queries.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
That said, it’s worth pointing out a couple of things about this survey:
It’s a few years old. The survey was conducted in 2018. Given that citations have almost certainly been decreasing in importance over time, it’s quite likely that they are less important today.
Not all SEOs believe that citations are still important. Even in 2018, there were quite a few SEOs who responded to Moz’s survey saying that citations were no longer of huge importance, and didn’t move the needle all that much.
That last point is an important one and one that we generally agree with.
Getting local citations from anywhere and everywhere is unlikely to have a big impact on your local rankings. However, we believe that there’s still some value in getting citations from relevant, trusted sources where people expect your business to be listed.
For the record, here’s what Google’s John Mueller says about citations:
Just because a company name is mentioned somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good or bad for the company. I’d see those mentions more as advertising — if you think people are going to see it and explicitly search out your business, then that’s great.