Build Local Citations for SEO Boost

Building citations is by far one of the best ways to impact local search result rankings and increase local traffic to your website. In addition to the boost provided for local searches by the Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) listings, many of the same sites will give you a backlink as well.

Why do citations help my ranking?

Google and other search engines will crawl the internet, looking for any mentions of your company’s NAP. Any reference it finds, on a good quality website, will add to your page authority in the local area and increase your ranking for local searches.

How do I build citations for my website?

This part is simple, yet time consuming… you just have to create entries on lots of high domain authority directories, maps and other similar sites. More on that below…

Can I create more than one citation on each site?

If you have multiple locations it’s recommended to create a citation entry for each. If you don’t have an individual website for each of your business locations, you should at least have localised landing pages for each branch on your company website. Include content about the locale and contact details of the regional branch, driving directions, local photos or a map can help too.

People are far more inclined to use local services and buy locally, this is reflected clearly by the increase in popularity of “… Near Me” searches. Creating good quality backlinks and citations for your company’s localised pages, could be one of the strongest SEO techniques of the present day.

Check your current local citations for errors or duplicates

It’s always worth running a few citation checker tools, to see where you stand at present for local citations. Here are some of those very tools, that will check your local citations and tell you where you need to create new citations for your business, update existing citations or remove duplicate citations:

• https://uberall.com – free citation checker
• https://moz.com/local/search – free citation checker

Watch this video from Moz all about local citations:

List of best UK citation websites for 2018

To aid you in your mission to create local citations for your business, taking out some of the hard labour searching for decent websites to list your company on, I’ve put together the list of directories below for UK based businesses to create as many citations as you like.

This is current data for 2018 and the citation directories are ordered by Domain Authority, giving the good quality directories with high DA more priority. Citation Value is a combination of domain authority, ease/speed of listing your business and the impact it has on your local search ranking, providing a more specific and deeper  insight into the power of each citation you can create.

Creating a listing in most of these citation directories below will give your website a considerable boost in local search results and put you ahead of your competitors for related search terms.

There’s plenty more where this came from in the White Rabbit blog.