How relevant are citations to SEO?
-
'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.
-
After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found.
-
Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword.
-
Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive.
Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own. This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly.
I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task.
My Ultimate Advice:
- Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!
-
-
With Google powering forward to semantics, knowledge graph and entities, citations also provide the "proof" that a company is who and where is says it is.
Back this up with 5 star reviews (another authority sign to search engines) and, with blended search, your G+ Local Business Page will appear in the main SERPs with orange review stars next to it - and be presented as an authority.
If online competitors haven't optimised their listings in this way or actively obtained reviews, your entry in Google Maps will get more clicks (another SEO benefit!)
Hope this helps?
-
Thank you, hope it is of use to you.
-
Excellent answer.
-
For 'regular' SEO citation usually offer very little to no value. Most citations include a nofollow link and citation-website are often not niche specific.
Sure users might go to a local listing service like yelp and search for a business that performs the service they need or sells the product they need. But these searches are often for local businesses. If the business we're talking about is indeed a local business than they would benefit from this through Local SEO and the users searching for them through these platforms.
For a non-local business the value of citations is debatable. It doesn't hurt, but there might be better links to pursue.
-
My question was about how much do citations help SEO? Sure some may go to a citation service to find a local business.
-
Citations are very important from a local business point perspective. Citations help increase your ranking in the local search results which can result in more customers.
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
-
Unsolved Are links from staff profile pages no longer good for SEO?
Hey there, We run a small site that lists lawyers and we have an opportunity to ask the lawyers to display a 'badge' on their own website's staff page, linked back to the page on our site that they are listed on. Initially I thought this would be good link building (i.e. the lawyer's own staff/profile pages on their website linking to our site where they are listed = a highly relevant link). I was less concerned about the authority of the law firm's sites, though these will range from sometimes low-ish to medium. I just assumed that Google would see the value in the lawyer wanting to link to our site where they are listed. However, our SEO has said that these days Google doesn't give much/any value to these types of links from individual staff pages. His advice was to try and get the badge added to one of their service pages (or their About page) which will be unlikely as the badge is person-specific. I thought I'd ask if this was everyone else's experience regarding Google not valuing links from individual staff pages? Thanks for you help 🙂
Link Building | | Andy-H0 -
Do links like this really help for SEO?
I was doing research with Moz's Link Explorer and one of our competitors had almost 50 links coming from sites like this. Mostly nofollow but we all know that today the nofollow can still help. My question is this: Will links like these help in any shape or matter. The reason I am asking is because Link Explorer is finding them, so I am sure Google will find them as well. Examples of sites: http://www.microlinkinc.com, http://www.cmolink.com The sites that I found via analyzing had DA 35-40 I don't want to share all urls but you get the point. Basically these sites are free keyword analyzing sites, once you put in a keyword they will bring up to 20 sites that rank for that keyword. And my research suggests that these pages stay and are crawl-able since Moz has crawled them. For example Moz says: date first seen 09/12/2018 so almost 6 months has passed but that result that was searched I am assuming has stayed. Would it make sense to search on such sites keywords that you know you are ranking for and then your site would be listed below and stay there for Google to crawl and another nofollow link in our link basket. Is my thinking correct or is it waste of time. Frankly it would take 2sec to run a search for each keyword. Any feedback and thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Davit
Link Building | | Davit19850 -
Duplicate content on site->citations? How important is it to change it?
Hi there, I recently realised that the citations and directories i was building used the same content than the one on my website. I know this is not best practice. I will for sure make sure it doesn't happen in the future, but I am affraid of the ones i built in the past. How much do you think this would affect my rankings, and do you think this is a priority to go through my citations and directories to modify it?
Link Building | | H.M.N.0 -
Looking for a reliable SEO company at a reasonable budget
Good day I've tried to contact most the recommended seo companies MOZ has but loads of them are mostly for MID-LARGE business and are out of my budget I have a monthly budget of 750-1,500 USD The niche is related not competitive and should be easy to rank, stoped doing seo 11 months ago and still rank 4-8th for the keywords im interested in anybody knows any good company for my budget? thanks a lot
Link Building | | recreoviral1 -
Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?
The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software. They also provide free printer drivers on their site. During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files. However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site. The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question: Would this look suspicious to Google? Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO? The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point. Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | motosantiago0 -
Best SEO when you have a lot of clients
So I'm in a bit of an interesting situation. I want to do great SEO for all my clients, but I currently manage 18, each demanding 10 - 20 hours per month. Is anyone out there able to manage a ton of clients and keep them all happy? What are the most effective strategies you use? I'm currently focusing almost exclusively on copywriting for all of them, simply because I don't feel like I have time to effectively test different strategies. Anyone have any advice?
Link Building | | nxmassa0 -
How important is the relevance of a link compared to its authority?
Would be interested on some perspectives on link relevancy versus page and domain authority in terms of importance for SERP. How important is the relevance of the site linking back compared to the page and domain authority of that site
Link Building | | casper4340 -
E-commerce SEO targeting Manufacturer Keywords
What are some good tips, articles, posts, etc. specifically on e-commerce sites that want to target the manufacturers they sell as keywords. For example: Footlocker.com wants to target "Nike" The products we sell are obviously much less competitive than Nike.
Link Building | | JMacSupply0