Local SEO: What Is A Citation?

<v ->What is a citation?</v> A citation is an online reference to your business’s name, address, and phone number, on an external website. which we refer to as a NAP, which is a name, the address and a phone number. As you’ll see from the image below, we have a screenshot from manta.com, which if you didn’t know, it’s actually a local business directory. In this screenshot, you will see, we have a listing for LevelFinish and in our list and we have our business name, we have our address and we have a phone number mentioned.

These are all the three elements that make up a citation, which as discussed is a name, the address and the phone number, which as you should know by now, is what we call then NAP. It’s good to note. We also have our website listed here below. However that doesn’t form part of citation. It’s only the name, the address, and the phone number. The information on a citation needs to match exactly how it’s shown on our GMB listing. That is super, super important. We wanna make sure all our citations are consistent.

If you have different information such as a different address on one of your citations, what happens is that you can end up confusing Google as to where you’re actually based, which only ends up leading to you struggling to appear for local search terms in your area. There are two types of citations you can have. The first is what we call structured citations. So these are typical citations and I have the layout in the correct structure and the correct order, which is a name, the address, and the phone number. The second type of citation is what we refer to as an unstructured citation. So this would be all the same details, but in a different structure.

So as you can see from the text on the right, we have the name first followed by the phone number, and then the address. As this isn’t laid out in the correct structure, a citation of this sort will carry less weight. They aren’t useless. They definitely do have some value. However, they’re not as strong as a standard structure citations. As a result, we really want to be making sure we focus on the normal structure citations, as these are the ones that have the most bump for our business. The rest of this training is all geared towards securing those exact citations. I’ve got another example of some citations, three of them being incorrect.

In the first one you’ll see we have the correct NAP. We have the name which has Casey’s NAP Cleaning Service. We have the address and then we had the phone number. In the citation on the right, you can see the phone number is completely wrong. Instead of being triple five, triple five, quadruple five, we have triple five, triple two, and then quadruple three. So this is the wrong phone number. So this is what we refer to as an incorrect citation. This is the type of citation, which ends up confusing Google. In this citation, you see we have the wrong company name. So again, this would confuse Google. And in the last citation, you can see we had the wrong address.

So we have Mountain View Lane, instead of a triple five South Street. So again, this citation would go against you in your marketing efforts. You wanna make sure you are building the correct citations, as these are the ones which will get you higher up in the map pack section.