How relevant are citations to SEO?

[arthureray]

'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?'.

[photoseo1]

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!!

[Tony-Dimmock]

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?

[WesleySmits]

Thank you, hope it is of use to you.

[arthureray]

Excellent answer.

[WesleySmits]

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.

[arthureray]

My question was about how much do citations help SEO?    Sure some may go to a citation service to find a local business.

[WesleySmits]

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.