How relevant are citations to SEO?
-
'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.
-
After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found.
-
Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword.
-
Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive.
Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own. This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly.
I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task.
My Ultimate Advice:
- Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!
-
-
With Google powering forward to semantics, knowledge graph and entities, citations also provide the "proof" that a company is who and where is says it is.
Back this up with 5 star reviews (another authority sign to search engines) and, with blended search, your G+ Local Business Page will appear in the main SERPs with orange review stars next to it - and be presented as an authority.
If online competitors haven't optimised their listings in this way or actively obtained reviews, your entry in Google Maps will get more clicks (another SEO benefit!)
Hope this helps?
-
Thank you, hope it is of use to you.
-
Excellent answer.
-
For 'regular' SEO citation usually offer very little to no value. Most citations include a nofollow link and citation-website are often not niche specific.
Sure users might go to a local listing service like yelp and search for a business that performs the service they need or sells the product they need. But these searches are often for local businesses. If the business we're talking about is indeed a local business than they would benefit from this through Local SEO and the users searching for them through these platforms.
For a non-local business the value of citations is debatable. It doesn't hurt, but there might be better links to pursue.
-
My question was about how much do citations help SEO? Sure some may go to a citation service to find a local business.
-
Citations are very important from a local business point perspective. Citations help increase your ranking in the local search results which can result in more customers.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Examination of Anchor Text Ratios for SEO
A new article on Search Engine Journal asks even though anchor Text Ratios are considered important by many SEOs for ranking in Google, are they really something to worry about?
Link Building | | akhter87610 -
Does adding relevant keywords to social postings help with SEO?
I was doing some research on social postings and SEO and couldn't really find the answer to my question. Would adding in SEO keywords help with my site's relevancy or would it just help boost my site because of backlinking? For example if I were to add a new Facebook post "Check out these great new blue widgets " help more than "Check out these new products "? Thanks!
Link Building | | EmazingKatie0 -
Does having our products on Amazon or EBay help with our SEO ranking?
We have an ecommerce web site, which ranks ok , but we are trying to build up our SEO scores. We're looking at links and were wondering if having our products listed on either Amazon or Ebay (or both) will actually help with ranking of our site? We sometimes have products listed on ebay with a reference to the higher price that the item is selling for on our main site. Thank you.
Link Building | | onwardsandupwards0 -
What are Best Practices for Ault Site SEO
Has anyone here had experience doing SEO for an Adult DVD website? A company has approached me and they obviously only want White Hat practices. I have used open site explorer to do research on some competitors. The top competitors of this company seem to have only a few high PR links from High Authority industry sites and almost all have a link from the Yahoo Directory. Does anyone know where or how to create high authority content links from this niche? It seems that most of the competitor links are on sub par pages and are single links in the side nav of other sites. I am not sure if I can post a link to the company here but any suggestions on link building for adult sites would be great. Please remember they are a retailer and don't have pop up advertising or any illegal content. Thanks,
Link Building | | macs220 -
Unable to build google local listings, are citations still useful?
Hello Google seems to be unhappy about letting us build google local profiles around our 'virtual locations, for each of which we have a dedicated page. We have approximately 100 'virtual locations' with addresses. I was wondering if, despite not being able to build google local profiles, it would still be worth it to build yahoo, bing, and utilize citation building services to each of those virtual locations. Would these citations in any way help bing or yahoo rank higher locally? Would the locally optimized city page rank higher as a result of all these citations? This is a service-industry based website btw.
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
Can anyone suggest a good SEO company ?
Hi we are hurt by many seo companies in the past who build bad quality links, and we got hit with a link penalty. Can someone refer me to a good decent SEO firm please ? nick
Link Building | | orion680 -
Could I be the victim of negative SEO?
While I was searching for bad links to one of my website, I realized that there were lots of backlinks from trackbacks on various blogs. Most of these trackback links are definitely spammy as they are not relevant with the blog topics and they use exact anchor text. The thing is that I am 300% sure that it has nothing to do with any SEO campaign services I've bought in the past. They link back to pages I've never optimized at all. So could I be the victim of a negative SEO campaign? What do you think?
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Is it worth editing older blog posts for SEO purposes?
The title of the question asks it all. One site I currently work on has a handful of blog posts that rank really well in the SERPS for certain "long-tail" searches. Would it be worth the time to, when I have it, to go back and edit the blogs little by little to help with SEO and building some links throughout the site to get people where we need them to go? Basically "sprucing" up the blog posts to make them more readable, more engaging and help some link building efforts within the domain. Thoughts?
Link Building | | TKIGWebTeam1