Today I am going to write a little about citations and their use in local SEO.
There is a lot of confusion on the subject, so lets clear that up!

Directory       da      pa
yelp.com        94      87
Issuu.com       94      95
foursquare.com  90      91
business.intuit.com     88      68
merchantcircle.com      86      61
manta.com       85      61

I presume you would love some links from directories and other sources of NAP listings, such as those above pointing straight at your site right? DoFollow or NoFollow you are going to get some juice here!

First, you should make sure that your GMB Listing (Google my Business listing) is created, verified, and filled out 100%. You can do this either manually or by using a service that instantly verifies the listing for you.

Traditionally, we create citations in order to send a signal to Google that notifies them we are working at this address, essentially saying, "Please, please rank us in the maps listings on Google!" Companies, such as PBN Butler, can help you with the tedious process of creating a list of citation sources to submit that are niche and geo specific. They are also able to then execute the process of submitting your details and individually verifying them to each citation source.

Some customers ask us, "Why aren't all citations live directly after submission?" and "Why are they submitted as a screenshare of instead of a live link?"

This unfortunately is due to the amount of spammy requests that the directories get on a daily basis, so a lot of directories have decided to no longer allow automatically verified submissions. This means that the submissions can take up to 6 weeks to be reviewed by a site administrator.

Once your citations have gone live, we usually ping the citations to make sure they index nicely and start working their magic for you!

Another question we get asked almost every day:
"My customer has moved addresses and their citations are all over the place, can you clean this up for me?"

Citation cleanup is a tedious process, but is worth the trouble!
Let's assume your customer has moved around a bit, and has citations in different directories with all kinds of different NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) details. These inconsistencies are not exactly ideal for your rankings.
Here is how you can fix it;
In the unlikely event that your customer has a full record of every citation they have created, and has taken note of the login details for all, you can then log in to each one and edit them.
Unfortunately, most clients will not have those details. Without record of the citations you can only claim/edit about 10-20% of all live listings immediately. Once you have done that, the best method is to email the admins of each directory and ask them to remove/update your listing. This is the cleanest method of updating the NAP details on the directory, and will get you the best results.

Lets say you have done all this and your customer now has a fantastic amount of citations from niche relevant, geo targeted citation sources. Surely, you want to really benefit from those citations for your organic rankings too right?
Don't worry, there is also a method to this madness;
Build high quality contextual links to your citations, maybe 100 - 200 to each citation! While this is some effort, the benefits you will receive are absolutely shocking!
If you dont have the time or tools to do this yourself, PBN Butler will boost your citations for you!
IMAGE OF CITATION LINK BUILDING HERE

Here are some other ideas on how to get high quality Citations:

Image Distribution:
Your image gets distributed via a network of high quality sites that allow a comment with the image. Next, geo tag the image and add your full NAP in the comment. Index and build links. Voila another HQ citation!

Video Distribution:
You create a short video about your business (30 seconds will do), upload that video to different sites, YT/Vimeo etc. and add your NAP in the description, build links, and off you go!

Press Release (PR) Distribution:
You write a great press release about how your business has come to the area and is ready to receive business at location x (enter you NAP here). Then you send your PR out via the newswire (a service that distributes your PR to relevant news sources), you get great publicity as well as a citation!

These three services will be available with PBN Butler from the beginning of June!
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