Citations are complete or partial references to your name, address, phone number or website (NAP+W) anywhere on the web. Learn more.
Citation basics
Build a unique set of citations for every physical office and be sure the name, address, phone number and website URL are absolutely correct on each citation you build.
Variance in abbreviations from platform to platform is normal (street vs. st. or # vs. suite). Know the acceptable abbreviations.
Only build citations for real physical locations. P.O. boxes and virtual offices are not acceptable.
Understand how local business data moves through the local search ecosystem, because a problem on one platform can lead to replications of the problem elsewhere.
For multi-location or multi-practitioner businesses, point the website link on all citations to the correct corresponding landing page on the website. For example, point your Chicago citations to your Chicago landing page on the website and point Joe Miller's citations to Joe Miller's page on your law firm website.
Most local businesses will want to be listed on the same set of major local business data platforms to start with, but beyond this, build citations on additional platforms that are specific to your industry or geography, such as the Chamber of Commerce, a contractor's association, or the local newspaper.
If you don't want your address to be public anywhere, as in the case of many service area or home-based businesses, you can still build citations, but only on those platforms which support hidden addresses.
Beware of duplicate citations — see Duplicates section, below.
Automated or manual citation building: your choice
Building manual citations
You can choose to build all citations manually, keeping track of their existence, status, and progress in a spreadsheet. The main benefit of this path is more direct control over your listings; the main drawback is the considerable amount of time manual creation and management involves, including time involved to update all citations if a business re-brands or moves. If you'd like to try manual management, these resources will acquaint you with top citations you will want to build:
- Where to get citations
- The best citation sources by US city
- The best local citations by category
- Top 100 international citation sites
- Finding where your customers are
Automated citation building
You can choose to pay for either manual or automated citation building instead of doing the work yourself. The main benefit of this path is a savings in time and ease of making updates across multiple citations at once if a business moves or re-brands; the main drawback is that not all services are of equal quality and some may cause problems rather than resolving them.
With most citation services you will have somewhat less direct control over your local business listings, but if the product is good, this is not normally a major problem. The main thing is to be sure that any service you consider is building important citations rather than selling fluff and that there are not known problems being alleged regarding the way the service is sold or managed.
If you are considering purchasing a citation building service, read this comparison guide.
Even if you do pay to have citations built for you, in some cases, you may want to augment this by building some citations manually on specific niche sites that aren't offered in agency packages.
Duplicate listing clean-up
Duplicates sap your listing strength so detecting and resolving them is key. Use these tools and tips to get those duplicates cleaned up:
Make basic duplicate listing detection on a variety of platforms easier with the use of a free tool like Moz Check Listing.
Advanced detection of Google duplicates requires special efforts. A combination of paid tools + knowing how to write query strings, as described here, should help you surface as many Google duplicates as possible.
You have several options for resolving Google-based duplicates, but Map Maker may be your best bet. Read more.
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