Local citations may not seem like much to the unknowing, but they are important elements of local SEO. Every instance of your business’ name, address and phone number helps your business gain more prominence and rise up Google’s Map Pack results. Not only that, but good citations can also encourage people to visit your physical store.

If you’ve been wondering where the best place to get citations from, we’re going to let you know below.

Google My Business

Did you know you can get a citation from Google? Yep, the biggest search engine in the world gives out citations to any local business. You can grab your citation by signing up to Google My Business. Not only does it give you an awesome citation, but it also means your business will start showing up in Google’s Map Pack. You don’t even need a physical location, either. If you are a contractor or another business that works in other people’s homes, you can set a service area that you cover,

Structured Citations

The most common form of citations will come from online directories. Typically, these are very general but some will be specific to a particular type of industry or geographic area. These listings tend to follow a similar structure and will all require your business’ name, address and phone number. These are the most important pieces of information to provide in your citation.

Examples of online directories include:

• Apple Maps
• Bing
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Infogroup
• Localeze
• Yelp

These are just a handful of listing websites that you can use. But it’s important to submit your business to as many websites as possible. You’ll want to make sure that you are always using the same information in the same format, so as not to confuse Google, and to make sure there are no duplicate listings.

Specialized Listings

As we have mentioned above, some directories are very specialized, usually aimed at a specific industry or a specific city. These aren’t useful to most businesses, but they are very useful to businesses in those areas or industries. That’s because these kinds of directories typically receive more traffic than generic business directories and have a good chance of directing traffic to your website.

A great example of a specialized directory is Tripadvisor. The platform only lists hotels, restaurants and other tourist companies. Not only is it a great citation, but it is widely used and an active profile is likely to send you traffic.

Unstructured Citations

You don’t have to submit your business details in a formal capacity to gain a citation. Unstructured citations are informal references to your business that can be found anywhere online such as in news articles, on social media and in blog posts. Traditional PR techniques, such as hosting and participating in community events are a great way to earn these kinds of references.

Business website

Don’t forget that your own website can act as another citation for your business. Make sure to include the address and phone number of your business on every page of your website. If you have several locations, create a page for each location.

Is your business ranking well in Google’s local results? Are you one of the three businesses listed in the map pack for your keywords? No? Then there is a good chance that you are doing something wrong, particularly if you are carrying out local SEO work on your own without the help of an agency.

Working out what is wrong can be difficult, however. Especially so, if you aren’t a local SEO expert. Don’t worry though, we have your back. Here are the most likely things that could be ruining your local SEO efforts.

Website issues

Your website is the cornerstone of your online present. That’s why a lot of SEO efforts are directed towards it. If you don’t have a website, you’re really going to struggle to rank, even locally. Even if you do have a website, it’s no guarantee that you are going to rank. There are a lot of issues that could go wrong with it.

Here are the most common problems that make websites bad for SEO:

• No location pages. If you want to rank well, you need to have location pages for every store or office you have, even if you just have one
• Website is not accessible. Your website needs to be responsive if you want to rank well in Google. If people can’t use it on every device, they aren’t going to use it at all and that’s going to cause your rankings to drop.
• Not optimized. If you haven’t optimized your content, titles and headings for your main keywords, Google isn’t going to rank your website for those phrases. You need to tell Google what you want to rank for.

Bad citations

One of the main ways that people try to boost their local SEO rankings is to create citations on business directories across the web. If done properly, these can work effectively. But they can ruin your local SEO efforts if they are done poorly.

When creating citations for your business, keeping them consistent is crucial. You want to use the exact same Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) every single time. Even something as small as writing the address with road spelled out instead of “Rd” can make a big difference.

Keep your citations consistent!

No or poor reviews

Reviews are one of the most important parts of Local SEO. The more reviews you have, the better. If you have more positive reviews than your competitors, there’s a good chance you’re going to outrank them. But many businesses don’t make getting reviews a priority. This can lead to businesses having a handful of reviews at best.

Not only that, but the reviews have to be positive. Bad reviews are going to be a huge turn off for potential customers and are going to tank your local SEO efforts. If you start getting bad reviews you need to improve your product or service and get in touch with reviewers. If you can find out what went wrong and fix it, there’s a good chance that the reviewer will upgrade their review.

Did you know that Google gets over 60,000 searches every single second. That equates to over 5 billion searches every single day. Did you also know that almost half of these searches are for local-based queries. That’s how large the local SEO market is — it’s vast.

This is why so many businesses invest heavily into local SEO. When you optimize your online presence for Google and local SEO in general, you’re able to drive visitors to both your website and your store. There are a number of ways to do this, including creating citations, setting up a Google My Business account and getting reviews.

All of these strategies are important. But they are not everything. There are several other things that are important if you want to rule local search results. One of these methods is location pages.

What is a location page?

A location page is a page on your website that is dedicated to detailing everything possible about one of your business locations. If you have more than one store or office, you will need to create location pages for every different store and location. These pages will contain information like the following:

• The address of your store
• Contact details such as your phone number
• Opening hours
• Anything else that customers might need to know such as directions

You can also include information about what is on offer at that store or office, who works there, how it is different to your other locations and pictures of the premises.

If you have a very large business, you may want to turn each location page into its own microsite. This can be useful if you cover a very wide area and have a lot of very specific information about each area. That way, you can create specific blog posts for each location and host them on the location page.

Why location pages are important for SEO

There are dozens of factors that Google considers when it comes to ranking local businesses in organic results and the map pack. Your website is one of them. It’s not enough to just put your address on your website, especially if you have more than one location. Google can’t get the information that it needs from that alone. But by creating a separate page for each location and filling it with loads of information, Google can find what it needs to decipher what your business offers and where it is located.

Location pages also give you another chance of ranking in search results. They won’t just help boost your chances of appearing in the map pack, but they can also give you another link in the organic results. When you create a separate page for each of your stores, you provide Google with another URL to rank. This means that for a single search, you could have as many as three listings in Google: one in the map pack, your homepage in organic results and your location page.

So what are you waiting for? Get started creating location pages for your business today!

Search engine optimization is essential for businesses of all sizes. With the right strategies, you’ll be able to increase traffic to both your online store and your physical store. Local SEO is the practice of ranking your brand in a particular area. But did you know that Local SEO doesn’t have to be limited to one location? Plenty of businesses have stores in more than one city. All of those stores can rank highly with the right local SEO strategy.

Here’s how you optimize for multiple locations

Set up pages for each location

When you’re ranking for one location, it’s best practice to include your location at the bottom of every page on your website. This helps Google to know exactly where you are based. But that doesn’t work if you have multiple stores.

Instead, you’ll want to create a page on your website that is dedicated to each location. These pages should be high in detail and include specifics about where your business is located, its phone number and how customers can get there — the more information the better.

Optimize for each location individually

You can’t rank locally in Google if you don’t optimize for each location individually. When it comes to single location local SEO, you would normally create citations for that business along with a Google My Business page. You’ll need to do that if you have multiple store locations. The only difference is that you’ll have to create multiple citations and a Google My Business profile for every single location.

You’ll have to provide a unique name, address and phone number (commonly known as NAP) for every location that you have. Note, that even the name has to be different, so instead of “brand name”, you call each location “brand name [location]. If any of these pieces of information is the same for any of your locations, Google may struggle to rank you locally across each store.

You’ll also need to create a unique Google My Business account for each location. These can be managed from one single account but every location must have a separate and unique page with different details.

Build links to your location pages

Link building is an important part of organic SEO, but it also plays a role in local SEO, too. As such, you’ll need to build links to each of your individual location pages. Part of this will be achieved by your citations, particularly if you include a URL when you create them. But you’ll also need to write blogs and guest posts, offer sponsorships and run other link building techniques to achieve this.

Manage and improve your reviews

With a separate Google My Business page for each of your locations, you’ll need to gather, manage and improve reviews for each of your business locations. It starts with encouraging reviews at all of your locations. Make sure that everyone who comes into your individual stores knows that they can go online and leave a review. You’ll also need to respond to each of the reviews, particularly the negative reviews in the hope that the reviewer may upgrade your review.

There are a host of reasons why businesses use SEO. One of the main objectives is customer conversion. You get as many people as possible to visit your store and website and convert them into customers. It even works with physical stores. A huge amount of people who carry out a local search on Google end up visiting a nearby store.

One way that can help to acquire users and to convert them into customers is positive reviews. Most consumers read reviews before making purchases. People are trusting reviews more and more so having positive reviews is becoming increasingly important.

But getting reviews can be tough. That’s why we’ve created this guide to help you get more reviews.

Launch an email campaign

If your business has a list of customer emails than you’re already way ahead of your competition. Even if they aren’t all customers, this is a huge opportunity to get some fresh reviews for your business.

The first step is to sign up for email marketing software so that you can start sending out emails. You’ll also want to create a landing page and an offer to get more consumers to sign up for your email list.

Once you have your list added to your email marketing software, start sending out emails ASAP. You’ll also want to set up automatic review emails every time a customer buys something from your online store.

Ask for reviews

You should be asking all of the customers who visit your store and buy something to leave a review online. They may not think about it if they are buying in person but their reviews are just as valuable.

You don’t have to ask them in person if you don’t want to. Creating an advert at checkout that directs people to a URL where they can leave a review is a great option. You can also use your social media pages to encourage people to leave reviews, too.

Engage customers

Not all reviews are going to be positive. There will always be some bad ones whether they are warranted or not. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore them. Instead, engage every customer that leaves a review, good or bad. That way, at least you show you are a communicative owner.

Responding to bad reviews can even help you to turn those 1-star ratings into 5-star reviews. Talking to someone about their experience and finding a way to improve it can often lead to customers changing their reviews.

You’ll also want to thank customers who have left good reviews so that future reviewers are encouraged to leave a review in the knowledge that their words will be acknowledged.

Spread the word

You should try and share your very best reviews on social media and your website. Again, this might be a great way to encourage even more positive reviews in the future. When people see the great things that people have to say about your business, they’ll be encouraged to try you out.