Listings Creation

Business directory listings, commonly referred to as citations, are online mentions of a business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). In some cases, the website URL is also included.

While this terminology isn’t super important, it is important to know how these help increase the authority and relevance of your business in your area, how they help your website to populate more often when consumers seek out your products and services locally, and, more importantly, how they may drive new business.

The key factors aren’t just the number of listings you have—accuracy, consistency and diversity of these listings are crucial.

Business Directory Listings, Defined

First, let’s talk about what these listings are, and where you might be able to find them. Chances are, you know what we’re referring to, although you might not have considered their importance as prominently up until now.

Directly listings show up in two different categories:

• Structured
• Unstructured

A structured listing would appear in the most common business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, the Better Business Bureau, or even you local chapter of Chamber of Commerce. Sometimes they are paid listings, sometimes they are free, and sometimes it requires regular attendance or memberships to be included.

The second, unstructured, are mentions of a business on blogs, forums, or local news sites. These tend to happen much more organically, but can have great value to your business in the long run.

The Importance of Local Listings Creation

While there isn’t much we can do to control unstructured listings, we can create structured citation sources, ensuring you gain as much benefit as possible.

There are two primary reasons why directory listings are important:

1. Visibility
2. Search engine trust

Customer awareness is necessary for any business. By making sure your business shows up across the most likely places for customers search, you can ensure a greater chance of being found. This is especially true for niche-related directories where only certain trades are allowed.

Aside from direct visibility, a longer value add is created because search engines rely on business directories to verify the legitimacy of a company. This is used as a factor to determine which businesses will show up in local search results when customers are seeking out products or services locally.

All things being equal, the more listings you have which are consistent and authoritative, the higher likelihood search engines like Google will showcase your brand as a result to a query.

Our Process

Our four-step approach ensures you get the quality and quantity of citations to bring the best results over a long period of time.

Audit and Cleanup

If you have been doing business for a while, there is a good chance some directories have picked up your information and added it to their website without your knowledge or input.

While this is useful, these automated listings may contain incorrect or inconsistent information, and sometimes they create multiple listings.

Our team identifies and erroneous data so each directory only has one uniform listing per business location.

Primary Citation Building

Once we have identified what citations you currently have, we submit your business information to the most important citation aggregators and directories where your business is missing.

This will ensures you not only put your business in front of the largest population possible, but smaller directories will naturally sync up and list your business information, expanding your reach over time, automatically.

Industry Specific Citations

As mentioned above, many industries will have directories specific only to their lines of work. Obtaining these listings is vital to improving the authority of a business’s website in Google and other search engines because of the high specificity it attaches to your brand.

We identify and submit your business to these niche directories which are perhaps the most valuable for credibility, yet often overlooked.

Ongoing Management

As a part of our digital marketing packages, we continually manage and maintain citation listings.

On top of making sure your business continues to gain new citations, we make sure the information remains correct, even if your business relocates or changes contact details from time to time.

Who Benefits from Citation Listings?

Citation listings are beneficial for all businesses, but they are especially useful for:

• Small businesses who want to improve local visibility and attract nearby customers
• Multi-location businesses who need to establish brand consistency and prevent duplicate listings
• Service-area businesses (SABs) who operate without a storefront, but cover large communities, towns, or cities
• Local professionals aiming to establish or improve trust and credibility in highly competitive industries (think lawyers, doctors, realtors, or general contractors)

A well-executed citation strategy strengthens your online presence, can improve your search rankings, and makes sure customers can easily find and trust your business no matter how they found you.