Citations Campaign

The purpose of this document is to explain what citations are, what a citations campaign is, what the campaign requires and what will happen during the campaign.

It will also explain why citations are important and why performing this process will benefit your business in terms of local SEO and boosting your online presence.

What are citations?

Citations are listings in online directories. Online directories are like a digital version of Yellowpages that list businesses, their services and contact details. By listing your business in these online directories, your company will appear in these listings and users will be able to locate you and your company.

Why are citations good?

Citations are good because they allow users to discover local businesses. This results in increased web traffic, visibility and transactions. They are very helpful for small-to-medium-sized businesses who rely on local enquiries. They’re also useful for any business looking to increase their online presence and boost their domain authority.

As well as being good for users, citations also help you perform better in Google’s algorithms. Google will be able to see that your business has been listed across these directories and its algorithm will recognise your business as legitimate because of how many times it has been accurately cited online.

In order to ensure citations work well, it’s absolutely essential that the business information on them is accurate. They need to be consistent with the business information you have listed on your website, Google my Business account and any other online profiles.

Inaccurate citations can misdirect and confuse customers. As Google’s goal is to provide the best possible information to its users, it will recognise inaccurate or inconsistent information and lower the ranking of the website associated with it.

What is a citation campaign?

A citation campaign is a process that builds more roads to your website and helps to generate leads and organic engagement. It starts off with your business contact details, which must be consistent with every citation.

Once we have correctly listed your business contact details on the online directories, Google will begin to notice the links leading towards your website. Depending on the specific online directory, the amount of time it takes for the citations to be verified will vary. Over the course of the campaign, all of the citations will go live and will contribute to increasing the domain authority of your website.

Which directories will I be listed in?

The most popular online directories are Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp and Yell. These directories are known as ‘high authority’ because they’re so well known and established. Having a listing in one of these directories will be particularly beneficial for your business.

There are also a whole host of smaller, lesser-known directories. While these aren’t ‘high authority’, they are still useful because they are indexed, recognised by Google and still have a strong enough authority to make them worthwhile.

There is a full list of the top 50 sites for citations available on BrightLocal

What does the campaign require?

The campaign will simply require your business contact details, which should be the same as your Google My Business listing (if you have one). In order to increase your visibility, it’s necessary to get your business ‘out there’, and the campaign we provide will list your business contact details on twenty-five online directories.

These directories will contact you over email for one reason or another, either to confirm the citation listing or to ask for some kind of verification. If you don’t want these confirmation emails going to your personal work account, then you can provide us with your ‘@general’ or ‘@support’ email address instead.

Additionally, if you’re not happy with your name being posted on these directories, then we can omit this information. The only information that is absolutely necessary is:

Some of the online directories (usually the high authority ones) will require verification. This verification is usually very simple and is done via your business phone number. You will usually be required to do something along these lines:

Once you have completed this verification process, your listing on their directory will be live. It’s that simple. For the majority of the listings, you won’t be required to do anything at all.

What happens next?

We’ll let you know when your citations are live and if you need to do anything for them to go live. Once your citations are live, your business will start to benefit from increased visibility on those directories and will help local users to find you and your services.

We will be able to monitor your citations using our tracking software so you don’t need to worry about them. If you want any removed or altered, we can look into this for you. You should note that once the citations go live, we may not be able to remove or change some of them due to the website’s publication policy.

If you want more citations, we can run another campaign of twenty-five listings for you. If you have any questions about the citations or about the emails you have received from the directories, you can contact us at any time and we’ll talk you through it.