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
-
★Does syndication of a news features from high Profile site like TechCrunch have a negative SEO impact?
As a co-founder of a startup that is weekly featured on high page rank news sites such as TechCrunch, The Next Web, TreeHugger , Yahoo News etc. These types of write ups are "SEO Gold" as they are high page rank sites with high relevancy to our sector and with unique good quality anchor text and copy. However... Within hours of each post going live the content and links are syndicated either via RSS or scraped and appear as duplicate content on in some cases 100's of very low quality and low relevancy content aggregation sites. To give you an example here are just two of the sites that are now appearing as linking domains due to this syndicated content and the links included in the article. Examples : Eco Market, The “Etsy For Eco,” Rebrands, Revamps, Raises & Prepares A U.S. Launch Sarah Perez | Technology | Page 4 The above are just a couple of examples amongst 100's that result from each feature. I would like to hear you opinion on if these links would be considered natural and you feel I should not take action or if you think these need removing by contacting the webmasters or disavowing the links? I am sure I cant be alone in having this problem and look forward to hearing you advice and tips
Link Building | | LiamPatterson0 -
How to do SEO for a social networking site?
Howdy SEOmoz fans, We are about to launch an educational social networking site. We have planned a lot of good strategies for offline and online marketing. Coming to SEO, how we can do search engine optimization effectively for our social networking site. The home page will be sign up page and there wont be any content in it. It would be great if you can suggest us prefect SEO tactics for our site. Thank you.
Link Building | | jjv0 -
Seo & Real Estate Site?
I am a Realtor. I am also a web developer. I want to make a site about real estate and web development. Primarily how I use my unique skills with web to sell homes. A real estate website caps it's Page Rank very low. There are not a lot of good backlinks to get when compared to the web development industry. There are millions of blogs I participate in about web development/seo. There are a lot of blogs I participate in about real estate too; however, the real estate websites all have low page ranks. This is obviously because the seo/web development industries know how to build page rank, which makes it easier to accumulate it. It's difficult finding good outlets to get link power from in real estate. How confused would google be? Is there an acceptable strategy to making this a reality? Please point out all of the variables I am not seeing. Pros and Cons. I'm not an SEO pro. I would be going for the keyword Pensacola Real Estate. I would accumulate backlinks from the real estate industry and the web design industry. Help 🙂
Link Building | | JML11790 -
Can I start SEO before finishing my website?
Hi, I'm new to SEO and websites. I'm slowly building a website at the moment. I was wondering if I could set up a blog at the domain name I will use for my final website and begin doing SEO. Eg. I set up a blog using a CMS like Squarespace and begin blogging at domain.com/blog (with links to the domain.com/blog from the domain.com home page) and inbound links point to the domain.com 'front page'. And then add the design of the 'front page' of the website using Squarespace at a later stage eg. domain.com. Is this a good idea? Will it work? I'm anxious to get started on SEO. Thanks!
Link Building | | doblstp0 -
Which Article Directories are still relevant?
Hi, I know Article Directories are not valued as high as they once were and many took a hit from Google. But are there any Article Directories that are still worth posting content on? Thanks!
Link Building | | MasonInteractive0 -
How to SEO how-to website?
I've launched the website www.ComoFazer.com.br, which is a Brazilian how-to website (the domain is literally how to in Portuguese). How can I get to the top rankings? My strategy so far: made all the on-page SEO stuff put 4 sidebar links in family websites bought the $90 package in GetLinksPro for 100 dofollow links spent about $100 in Facebook Ads to get 2k followers there I want help regarding SEO and strategy for this kind of sites.
Link Building | | kikocherman0 -
Links Through Banners are good for SEO?
Hi, I am planning to get to an agreement with some blogs to have my banner that link to my site. My question: Is this Good for SEO, Bad or Neutral? Thanks in advance, Maria Jesus
Link Building | | goperformancelabs0 -
SEO value of expired Pages
We run a classified site and after every day there are thousands of ads/pages that get expired which has no use to visitors. What is the best practice to deal with them keeping SEO factor in mind? Should we keep them as they are linking to home page. redirect 301 to existing, 404 to home page or any other practice. Please advise.
Link Building | | razasaeed0