A citation is any place your business’ NAPW (Name, Address, Phone number, Website URL) information appears together online, typically in an online directory or business listings website.
These are particularly important to get in place for local SEO, as if you don’t appear in the places people are looking for businesses like yours, you’re likely to get overtaken by the competitors that do.
There are two types of citation: unstructured and structured. Structured citations typically appear in business listings and come from form fields being filled in when the listing is claimed. Below we’ve highlighted in yellow the structured citation for a Yelp listing.
Unstructured citations are more likely to be the result of press and social media, wherein your NAPW information is visible and connected on a web page (perhaps throughout a local news piece about the business), but not in a structured format.
Getting citations for your local business isn’t just important, it’s widely known as ‘table stakes’ in local search optimization, as in ‘if you don’t get citations, you can’t play the game’. While it’s key to make this a foundational aspect of your local SEO strategy, by building citations in the most relevant websites, research shows that if they’re not regularly updated and cleaned up, there can be serious consequences.
DID YOU KNOW? 68% of consumers say they would stop using a local business if they found incorrect information in local directories.
