When it comes to boosting your SEO rankings, citations can be incredibly valuable. In their simplest form, are mentions of your business name, address and phone number (NAP) on another website. Sometimes the citation will include a backlink to your website, and other times it may not. It may seem pointless for a citation not to include a backlink, but these elements are still of great importance when it comes to search engine optimization.
What Exactly Is a Citation?
Your business may have many citations in the wild without you realizing, especially if an agency or another authorized third party has submitted your details to business directories. For example, your business may be listed on business directories such as Yahoo Business or Yelp without any backlink to your business website. Over the last few years, these listings have become more and more important to Google’s ranking algorithm. The main reason for this is that Google is the source of their own data business information with third party business listings. A website that has a good selection of exact match citations should experience higher rankings than a website with little or no citations.
How Citations Help Boost SEO
Google is all about relevance and delivering the best possible user experience. Citations can help to boost your location-based search results. Google looks at the NAP data that is included in business directories and other websites and compares this information with the NAP data on your business website. This will help Google to determine whether your site is authentic or not. The more matches it can find, the higher your authenticity score and the higher your rankings.
What Others Have To Say about Citation Importance
Check out this article from entrepreneur Magazine that list citations as one of the five online basics your businesses needs to survive.
How have citations helped your business?
We love to hear your story about how you have used citations for your ranking strategies. I welcome you leave your comments below.