Citation building
-
Hi!
I´m trying to get some understanding of local SEO. Most of my clients are based in Norway, will building citations in other countries have any effect on the rankings (negative / positive)
Will it be better spending my time creating citations on norwegian listings?
-
You are very welcome! Thanks for asking a good question.
-
Thank you very much! Nice local skills
-
Hej Aleksander! Hvordan går det?
So, here's the straight talk on citations. There are 2 main benefits to building them:
-
The more local business platforms on which you list a business, the better the chances are that customers will find you on their choice of sites. So, for example, customers who really like TripAdvisor will find your business there if you're listed there, and customers who prefer Yelp will find you over there, if you're listed.
-
Citation spread, consistency and authority are all believed to positively impact Google local pack rankings. So, the more citations you have on quality, relevant platforms, the more 'trust' it is believed Google will feel in the validity of your business data.
So far so good, right? But, it's very important to understand that all of the above is tied to you having a unique physical location in a specific place. For example, your business is located at Karl Johans gate in Oslo. You can only build citations for this specific location. You cannot build citations stating that your business is also located in Sweden, for example. But, what you should do is research which directories the search engines return most highly for you core search terms and be sure you are listed there, regardless of where the business data source is. For example, lots of US-based businesses are listed in directory called Hotfrog, which is physically located in Australia. So main takeways are:
-
Build citations on those directories that are popular in Norway for your industry's common searches, regardless of where the citation platform's company is physically located, but ...
-
Only build citations for your actual physical location. Never try to appear as though your business is physically located in any other city or country, unless you have a staffed physical office there.
Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!
-
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
-
Link Building Paralysis
I have been hesitant to build links with all these penalties and need a few good tips for building good quality links. I have a wedding and photography business and we produce tons of photo content which we: blog - 1-5 times per week Facebook Social bookmark Get our work featured on other sites 1-2 times per month Any other ideas I'm missing? I know their is a ton. Just need some fresh, clean link building ideas.
Link Building | | photoseo10 -
Link building for big webite. 2500+ posts.
We run a big kids website: http://mocomi.com/ and have over 2500+ posts. Its about 2 years old now. No SEO was done on this site until the last two months when I was hired for SEO. I divided the SEO into 2 parts - on-page and off-page SEO. For the last 1.5 months I did the on-page fixing - correcting URLs, optimizing posts with best keywords, adding meta titles and descriptions to each post, 301 redirects etc. Now that on-page optimization is over, I have to do the off-page thing - build links. But with so much content I'm confused on how should I go forward. Among the 2500 posts I have listed down 700 posts that have real traffic potential so I'm planning to build links to these. But 700 is a huge number which includes our home page, 50+ category pages and rest are posts. So the question is how should I build links to these? Should I pick up each page and build links to it and move to next or as some people suggested, build most links to home page and category pages and that'll pass pagerank to my posts and help them rank. What link building plan would you suggest? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | Mocomi0 -
Backlinking / Link Building Services
Hello, Our site is struggling organically and one of the key factors (not surprisingly) is a lack of backlinks. We have hired a content writer and are working on a content strategy to generate quality, relevant backlinks. But this is more of a long term project. After reviewing backlinks to our competitors' sites, it seems clear that they are using agencies or services to generate backlinks (most coming from low quality sites). I'm aware that this isn't a good long term strategy (although it seems to be serving them well at the moment). I was hoping the community could provide some insight on products or services out there that provide "safe" backlinking strategies. I don't want to do anything that is going to harm us in the future. I've read a bit on the hoth, and it seems fairly safe and potentially effective, but it's hard find much objective advice on the topic. Any insight is much appreciated - thanks in advance! Jason
Link Building | | ba_seomoz0 -
Link building without using trademarked names
If a particular brand's terms & conditions stated that you cannot use their trademarked names in your backlinking strategy, what are some good ways to rank higher for those names?
Link Building | | aidin30000 -
Stop Building Links During Reconsideration Request?
We had a message in webmaster tools to say our site had 'unnatural links' pointing towards it. I investigated and found a number of sites where we had uploaded articles, containing links, had been de-indexed. As such we have suffered a few drops in rankings. I have submitted a reconsideration request and I'd like to get on with recovering any lost ground. However, I am wondering whether it's best to cease any link building activity whilst the reconsideration request is processed. Please do let me know your thoughts and experiences on continuing to build links after submitting a reconsideration request.
Link Building | | RiceMedia0 -
Link building
What is the difference between External Followed Links and Total External Links, why are the numbers different? Should the numbers not be the same? I have a difference of 24 links can anyone explain why?
Link Building | | vendorshop0 -
What are some of your best tips, strategies or resources for link building?
I currently work for a contract manufacturing company so when I think about building links it seems as if it's going to be a daunting task. Mainly because any kind of content that you can come up with is rather dry. When I go about searching for links I usually run into a lot of directories that charge anywhere between $25-$50 for a listing. I've had a hard time convincing marketing that we should start a blog which may be a good way to build some links if we come up with quality posts but those posts may be few and far inbetween. Does anybody have any recommendations for building links for this type of company or subject matter? Also, and I'm sure we have all heard this. When I mentioned the fact that we should be building some quality links to the site marketing first asked why and then commented "Well that shouldn't take you too long". Why is it so difficult to get management to accept the fact that managing a website is an ongoing and constantly changing process that involves research and experimentation?
Link Building | | TRICORSystems0 -
Link building software
Does anyone know of any software that will build links if I enter the URL in? I know this sounds silly but I had to ask... I know ontolo is good to discover which links you need based on a key word and I know the SEOmoz tools do the same. My question is that is there any software that you can then enter all the links you have found and acquire them, Thank you for your answers. I really appreciate it. Vijay
Link Building | | vijayvasu0