Citations and brand awareness have a huge impact on whether or not your local business appears in the SERPs. And since search is how customers find a local business, you need to leverage citation building to win in local search. What is a citation? Citations are online references to your business NAP - your name, address and phone number. Citations are the local SEO equivalent of links, pointing to your physical location instead of your website. And just like links, they pass the juice : "Like links to your website, Google uses them to gauge your business' online authority," says UK-based local SEO specialist Mark Walters. Advertising Continue reading below Google uses relevance, distance, and prominence to assign this local ranking juice.
You have a say in relevance, which Google says is simply about how close a match is. You can't control the distance. But you hair masking service can definitely control the prominence. This is where creating quotes comes in. And just like links, they are also useful for people. It's not just search engines that scour local business directories, looking for a plumber, coffee shop, carpet retailer, chiropractor or other business. in their region. That's how a lot of businesses find themselves these days. Unlike links, citations can be plain text - Google doesn't care whether they link to our website, as long as they refer to your business name, address and phone number. Structured and Unstructured Quotes Structured citations are what you'll find in local business directories.
You will often have control over the form in which they appear so that you can modify them to your liking. Any Yelp listing page is a good example of a structured citation. Advertising Continue reading below Unstructured citations are mentions of your business name or contact information on non-directory sites. If you walk into a local newspaper article about how Main Street is really picking up, or if a blogger talks about how good your Coq au Vin is, you'll get an unstructured quote. Often it will be incomplete - mentioning your name and address but not your telephone number, for example. How do you create quotes? This brings us to the most important question - in what ways can you put these quotes together?