Citations refer to making available your business name, address and contact information on the internet. The reason why small businesses should obtain citations is that it can help them to easily get ranked in the local search result. When your business has citation, your website will gain trust with Google and have a much more likely chance of ranking in the Google Maps. It can take some time to build your citations so you must be patient.

Usually, citations of small businesses are found in the online yellow pages directory, local chamber of commerce, portals and business association sites. Citation is especially important if you don’t have a website. You should try to get as many citations as possible for your business on well indexed sites that are reputable and have a high volume of traffic. The more citations your business have, the higher your business site will rank on the search result and this impacts your local SEO specific to Google My Business rankings.

It is important that the citations are at the right site that is relevant to your niche. If you have no idea where to obtain the citations, you can do research on your competitor and find out where they obtain their citations. Before you visit sites to submit a request for citation, make sure you have type down the complete business information such as business name, address, ZIP code, hotline number, operation hours, and promotions. You must double check these information and make sure that they are correct before you proceed in building the citations.

You should first submit your business information to local directories that specifically list businesses in your location. After you finish submitting to all the local directories, you can visit general business directory sites to get your business listed there. There are several types of directories including directories based on industry, local area, and national directories.

You can search for your keyword + area where your business is based in the search engine to see what directories come up in the search results. Examples of the top directories where you should be building your citations are Yelp, Thumbtack and Manta. You should place more importance on directories that have traffic as doing so will allow your prospective clients to immediately find you on the search result. Directories that have traffic usually also have high domain authority.

Since the directory is getting lots of traffic, your listing will surely be found by a lot of potential customers. This prevent you from having to rely on the visitors from organic search result. Even though it is better to get listed on directories with traffic, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore directories that do not have a decent amount of traffic at all. The more directories you get your business listed, the more the potential customers will find you.

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