What is the Importance of Citations?

The first question about citations that pops up in our mind is, are they really important? Indeed, they are! Citation building is a foundational ranking factor. Citations validate that a business is part of a community. It’s hard for someone to fake membership in a chamber of commerce or a city or county business index. Citations can dramatically improve your Local search engine rankings.

The next question people generally ask, how many citations is enough. It is recommended that every business should be listed or included in the top 30-40 citations for their country and industry. Whitespark has a list of the top ones that you can look through in this list.

If you have lots of citations for your business, the variations in the NAP across all the citations are quite common. You should spend your time wisely on cleaning up the citations and on making all your citations’ NAP consistent. If you are wondering what NAP variations you should consider changing, here is a complete list:

• If the listed name is a close variant or contains the correct name, Ignore it.
• If the name listed is completely different, Fix it.
• If the address is correct but is abbreviated or missing a suite #, Ignore it.
• If the city name is wrong but the zip code is correct, Ignore it.
• If the street name listed is missing/adding a direction prefix, Fix it.
• If the address is completely different, Fix it.
• If the phone number listed is one that also rings to your business, Ignore it.
• Anything else, Fix it.
• If the domain listed is not the main one for your website, Fix it.
• If you switched to HTTPS but your listing has HTTP, Ignore it.