How businesses get local citations without submitting them?
-
How do some businesses get listed in directories like YellowBook, SuperPages, MerchantCircle, etc. without submitting their information. For example, my dad's company listed themselves in YellowPages and Google Places years ago, but also show up in the ones listed above without having submitted the information to them or having paid anyone else to do it...
-
Hi Chase,
Both Wissam and Linda have done a great job of explaining how data in one place gets fed to many others. Do check out the link to David Mihm's graphic. It's excellent.
-
Chase, Wissam's link will help a lot.
But in general many citations, stem from the yellow pages. Many mature businesses I've worked with have never submitted a single citation, yet have 50,000 or more.
If they've been listed in the phone book, it propagates out from there. Many directories scrape the online yellow pages, then other directories scrape those directories. Plus you'll see in David Mihm's visual, many of the back end data providers get phone book data and business listings, then feed the info out to tons of other sites.
-
here is a piece of information collected by David Mihm That lets you understand that when submitting to a few other might "take" or aggregate the new info
Local Ecosystem: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012
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
-
Google+ Local ranking for company with no website
Hi,
Image & Video Optimization | | Ant71
Im about to start helping a small business who has a facebook account but no website. Has anyone got any experience of getting a business ranking locally without a website? Just wandering if NAP details from a facebook / Google+ account helps with local citation building? Or whether a basic website is required? Antony0 -
Confusion About Local SEO
Hi, I hope someone might be able to help me out with this. I am somewhat confused. Basically I have a site that has 2 operating bases in 2 neighboring counties. Say Hampshire and West Sussex. Now I understand the need for schema markup. However, where exactly to put this markup I cant see a definitive answer. even on the official googleblog they seem to shy away from answering this. For the moment I have placed it on the contact us page and obviously there are 2 sets of schema markups for the 2 addresses. Now, the bit I am confused about is that I was reading the Koozai Local SEO white paper and they mention to have the addresses in the footer. This is fine and I can do that, especially as there are a lot of sub pages on the site for different products which we would like to try and rank for. Now, this is the bit I am slightly confused on, should the addresses in the footer be the schema markups? I suspect not but I would like to be sure. Many Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | kirstyseo0 -
What is the best way to optimise the website of a service area business websites for local search?
Service area businesses are a little caught in the middle when it comes to local optimisation and can really struggle to So what approaches would your recommend for optimising a service area business: Assuming the following, perhaps obvious, goals: Make sure your site visitors can clearly understand if their location is covered by your service areas Compete for search traffic for service + location searches (including those with an implided location). One common tactic that I see being used is to generate humongous lists of locations, maybe in a footer. Obviously the more areas you want to include the less relevant (and more spammy looking) your targetting looks. And of course, with loads of locations, you're not going to be able to get them all into your titles (even if you wanted to!) Maybe if you've got locations that are more inportant to you you might create specific landing pages for these location? If you've got the kind of business where the locations you target are determined by the locations you can reasonably get to during a working day it's really tough to find a realistic way to target specific location on your site. I'd be really interested to hear how you approach these kinds of sites.
Image & Video Optimization | | DougRoberts0 -
How do you manage phone verification when claiming listings on behalf of clients (local and remote)?
As the top competitive difference maker, Quality/Authority of Structured Citations is pretty important. That being said, I spend a good deal of time manually running around to different citation websites and jumping through their hoops to get my clients' websites listed properly. I've been using getlisted.org to check my sites, and a lot of the citation sources out there require phone verification. Now I was wondering how you professionally manage the phone verification step for your own clients. I've found it a bit difficult getting my clients to reliably get the PIN numbers for me. I've even had problems with clients checking the mail for the post cards that get sent! At this point in time, I try to schedule a time (not during business hours preferably) to go into the location and answer the phone to get everything verified in one shot. For remote clients however, I just have to hope that they are on board with answering their phones and getting the PIN numbers back to me. Lastly, how do you manage to reduce the amount of sales calls that your client receives from these listing sites? I currently register accounts under a separate email address, for example, webmaster@domain.com. This cuts down on the email marketing spam, and it obviously helps me stay in control of the listings. How do you handle the phone calls though? Especially from some of the more aggressive companies like Yelp? Personally I've just been 'briefing' my clients on how to respond to these sales calls, and I've educated them on the importance of these listings so they aren't too annoyed with the assault of sales reps calling their business constantly. Are there any magic words that my clients can use with these sales reps to make them stop calling? Sorry for the long post, if you've made it this far thank you for reading!
Image & Video Optimization | | IronSummitMedia0 -
Best Tool For Local Rank Tracking
Hello Everyone, I have taken a few clients recently that i'm doing local SEO for; I'm curious of what the best tool is for keyword tracking with local intent? I have heard things about WhiteSpark and MicrositeMasters, but I have no idea what is the best, is SEOmoz's tracking good for local? Thanks Zach
Image & Video Optimization | | Zachary_Russell0 -
City/Town content pages for a local business
Earlier this month I asked a private question on the use of schema for service area pages on a home improvement contractors website. The question led to Miriam Ellis giving me some great ideas about creating content for pages specific to the clients service area. The goal here would be to rank for [roofing contractor + city] using a URL similar to: mycompany.com/service-areas/city-state A great idea Miriam gave me for creating content for these pages: Showcasing a previous project in that city/town with a well-written project description, photos, videos and client testimonials. Her advice is excellent and I wanted to share it with you. I also wanted to open up the discussion and see what others have had success with. If the company is relatively new, and doesn’t have the work history to create pages such as this, what would you do?
Image & Video Optimization | | WilliamCarr0 -
How to get my forum to be listed on Google in the Discussions section?
I'm running several community sites with forums (for example http:// www.finalstitch.co.uk). All of those sites have a forum section like http://http://www.finalstitch.co.uk/forum/ So far Google didn't recognize the forum. When I search for the site and click the Discussions filter on the left, no forum topics from my site show up. What should I do to change that? Thank you. 20110616-gu1beph7p673x1jkgahy1q63r.jpg
Image & Video Optimization | | asmirasro0 -
Will linking to my citation sources help google recognize them / credit my places account?
Or will those sources be discounted by google then similar to how google discounts link exchanges? I have noticed some pages, like mapquest, don't really have a directory, so google might not be aware of their content unless it is linked too??? In this type of a case, would it help to link to mapquest's search results? then the citation will get picked up by google? Example: http://www.mapquest.com/?hk=6-i30tP49i
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0