Citation Submissions
Citation Submissions, often referred to as “Online Business Directories”, refer to the mention of your business on the web like on someone’s website. In offline marketing, it is quite similar to old days “yellow books”. Since nowadays everyone refers to the Internet, businesses are mentioned online.
Local Citation Submissions help your business rise in the search engines with local SEO.
For local SEO purposes, it is important to get listed in as many high-quality directories as possible, since the top results on Google are all citation sites.
Examples of Citation Sites:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- Merchant Circle
- CitySearch
However, be cautious about low-quality citation sites. We can take help of Moz Bar to determine the domain authority of a website which will help us stay clear of citation sites that are not well-known. If the domain authority is high and spam score is low, it implies that the citation site is not spammy.
Below are the components that can be listed on citation sites:
- Name of Company.
- Name of Company & Phone number.
- Name of Company, Phone number & Address
- Name of Company, Phone number, Address & Website
- Name of Company & Website
- Phone Number
- etc
A complete local citation includes the Name of the Company, Address and Phone number, which is referred to as your “NAP”. A citation that does not include all three of these is referred to as a partial citation.
Sometimes, we may hear of NAPW or UNAP, where W refers to the website, & the U to the URL.
The website link from citation offers additional value in local SEO ranking.