Citation Building - Should this still be a part of our link building strategy?

[AfroSEO]

With algo updates like Pigeon, should citation building still remain a core part of our link building strategy?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi AfroSEO,

Citation building is still completely fine for qualifying local businesses, but I tend to think of the main goal of this as being the dissemination of your business data throughout a wide variety of platforms rather than primarily as a linkbuilding strategy. In a competitive field, your best competitors are all likely to have similar citations sets on the major platforms, so you having the same won't really be a competitive difference maker between your business and others. Rather those types of gains tend to come from things your competitors haven't managed to achieve ... such as earning more or better natural links for great content on your site, having your business featured on blogs and news sites, earning social notice, etc.

[AfroSEO]

Thanks, this was my general idea. I have been hearing quite a bit of conflicting info, just wanted clarification.

[SapientSEO]

Citations are STILL a powerful part of local SEO. They've gotten somewhat of a spammy rap over the last few years due to SEOs offering them as a spam link building service, but they are still powerful and important.

The key is less about quantity and more about relevancy. Look for niche specific listings sites and more importantly, city specific listing sites. The more local and geo relevancy you can drive through your citations, the better.

Here's a service I use: http://webris.org/products/local-citations/

[LesleyPaone]

I second this. Whitespark is great.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Absolutely yes.

Citations are wonderful for local search and to pass additional signals to Google that you wont get from a traditional link.

I would also suggest paying for a Whitespark account as this is amazing for finding citation sources.

If you don't want to pay, a little trick is to find the phone number of your competitors, search for that number in Google and see which sources are indexed (that aren't the competitor). You can get good citations that way also.

-Andy