Local Citation Management | Local SEO

Updated by Chima Mmeje — November 21, 2024.

Local citation management is the process of creating, maintaining, and overseeing online mentions of a business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) across various websites, directories, and platforms. This management is crucial for local businesses to enhance their online visibility, search engine rankings, and credibility. By ensuring your business information is consistently listed across multiple online directories, you help search engines verify your business’s existence and legitimacy. This, in turn, can lead to higher local search engine rankings and increased traffic to your website.

Importance of local citation management for businesses

Search engines like Google use local citations as a key ranking factor for local search results. Consistent and accurate local citations across multiple platforms help search engines verify a business’s existence and boost its ranking in local search results.

Local citation management is a crucial aspect of any effective local SEO strategy. When search engines detect consistent and accurate business information across multiple reputable sources, they are more inclined to rank your business higher in local search results. This improved visibility can lead to increased foot traffic, phone calls, and online inquiries from potential customers, ultimately contributing to the growth and success of your business.

There are three major options you can choose from for active location data management:

Data aggregators play a crucial role in local citation management by compiling and distributing business information across various online directories and platforms. This process streamlines citation building and improves listing distribution, helping businesses achieve better visibility and accuracy in local SEO through efficient data management.

1. Manual citation management

In this scenario, you manually build, edit, and manage all citations. To execute this well, create a database listing all existing citations, their accuracy, and their status.

Using a local citation finder tool can help businesses manage their online citations effectively, saving time and ensuring accuracy compared to the manual citation building process.

You should correct inaccuracies and seek closure of duplicate listings. You must also frequently audit all citations in order to discover new citations that have been automated, new inaccuracies, and new duplicates that may have emerged, with the view of correcting them. You must be able to audit and update all citations in the case of moves, mergers, rebrands, or changes to phone numbers, hours of operation or other components. Finally, there should be a method of alerting you to new reviews for the purpose of management.

Who does manual management work for?

Manual management can be appropriate in two specific scenarios:

• A bootstrap startup with more time than money. If the business owner needs to do everything by themselves to get started, they can learn about citation building and management and undertake their own active management process. 
• A company at any level that uses an automated service for core citation management on major platforms, but which wishes to supplement this by building additional citations on geo/industry-specific platforms (like Chamber of Commerce websites or the websites of medical boards) not included in that service.

What are the pros and cons of manual citation management for local business directories?

Pros of manual citation management include direct control over the company's citations, not tied to any third party. Additionally, the company can choose to build citations on any platform that seems like a good match.

Cons include the extreme amount of time involved in manual active citation management. Even a brand-new single-location local business must be prepared to put in hours of initial and ongoing work. There are also risks inherent in a lack of experience or lack of organization. It's easy to make costly mistakes building citations, and without proper organization, it's easy to lose track of the existence and status of citations, resulting in further loss of time and the accidental proliferation of inaccurate/duplicate listings.

Finally, poorly funded companies may be unable to get listed on certain priority platforms due to associated costs, whereas some citation management services discount, ameliorate, or otherwise build these costs into the package pricing at a more reasonable overall rate.

2. Semi-automated citation management

In this scenario, you engage a service that automates the push of local business data to some platforms and then manually builds additional citations on platforms beyond the boundaries of the automated data push.

Using local citation software provides coverage on major platforms and facilitates the creation of listings on hundreds of niche sites across various industries. This enhances local SEO by targeting specific sites that are most relevant to individual businesses.

Who does semi-automated management work for?

This approach to citation management can be a good fit for small-to-large businesses, if the price is appropriate and the quality of the service is high. Many of these services charge a set fee per citation, so it's important to carefully research what you're signing up for prior to purchase.

What are the pros and cons of this approach?

Depending on pricing, semi-automated citation management can offer a wide variety of citation platforms to choose from, including those that apply to specific industries and geographies. Instead of being obliged to build these supplementary citations manually, the company can pay the service to undertake the work.

On the negative side, services like these often fail to offer ongoing citation management. They typically provide a one-time service to get citations built, but will charge you again if the data in your citations becomes polluted. Citations should not be considered a set-and-forget asset. Additionally, costs can become prohibitive and some semi-automated services pad their offerings by providing listings on directories of questionable quality. It's extremely important for companies to know that they're making an investment in something of value, rather than in busy work that doesn't ultimately contribute to the rankings, reputation, or revenue of the business.

3. Automated citation management

In this scenario, you typically purchase a service, enter your business data, and then that data is automatically pushed out to a set number of platforms with no further effort on the part of the business owner. Moz Local is an automated solution of this kind.

It is crucial to build local citations to enhance your local SEO. Techniques for creating these citations include manual listings and the use of software tools. Ensuring accurate and consistent information across various platforms is necessary to achieve effective results.

Please note that not all automated solutions are equal. Their pricing, network of partner platforms, dashboard, capabilities, tools, and features make each of these services unique, necessitating serious research before signup. For example, you’ll want to know whether a platform you’re considering permanently closes duplicate listings (as Moz Local does) or simply suppresses them, and you’ll want to look for studies indicating what may happen to your local business citations should you cancel the service.

Who does automated management work for?

While automated citation building is appropriate for businesses at all levels, it's particularly useful in the following scenarios:

• Multi-location, multi-practitioner, and enterprise-level businesses requiring automated management of a complex network of thousands of citations
• Any business undergoing significant data changes resulting from mergers/acquisitions, rebranding, moving, or changing phone numbers, necessitating automated auditing and updating of the citation set
• Any business which discovers that it's being negatively impacted by inaccurate or duplicate local business listings and needs to scale cleanup of these problems
• Any business desiring additional capabilities to improve active location data management, such as instant alerts to bad data, user review alerts, review management, analytics, and reporting
• Agencies tasked with client citation management

What are the pros and cons of this approach?

Automation massively reduces the time spent managing citations. The Moz Local team has discovered that the average enterprise has between 3,500–10,000 duplicate local business listings. Manually addressing this problem would require that a business allocate 44 weeks of the work year to this task, making the need for automation obvious! Additionally, high-quality solutions provide helpful dashboards which control, track, and analyze local business data, giving brands and agencies a true competitive advantage.

The cons of automated solutions come down to pricing, quality, and limitations. Price varies widely, and each company must determine whether the value outweighs the investment. Quality is also a difference-maker when it comes to choosing solutions. Read articles and reviews of each service you're considering and acquaint yourself with their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, each platform will have its limitations; for example, the number and quality of the partners they will list your business on. More isn't always better, as we've mentioned above. Be sure the solution you're considering isn't bulking up their offerings with low-quality directories. Choosing an active location data management partner requires making a fully informed decision.

There's no standard answer to this question. Your goal should be to accrue enough high-quality citations to surpass your competitors, both in local search rankings and in your overall visibility across the web. A bakery in a small town in Iowa may need just 20 solid citations to become dominant, whereas an auto dealership in Los Angeles will understandably need to build and earn far more citations than that to lead the pack. One of the most comprehensive local citation studies in recent years of the impact of citation development found that businesses of all sizes tend to see the best ROI from building out about 30-40 citations. 

While each business will want to accrue a robust set of accurate citations, it is wasteful to go overboard on this, building citations on irrelevant, low-quality directories simply for the sake of numbers.

Bear in mind that while citations are a major local search ranking factor, they are just one of several hundred factors believed to influence rankings. The amount of funding and time you invest in citation management should be determined by the competitiveness of your industry. Allocate appropriate resources to other areas of marketing too, such as content development, link earning, and social media engagement.

Never purchase citation management services from anyone that guarantees an improvement in search engine rankings. While experts agree that citations influence rank, no one can actually guarantee how much they will influence the search engine results particular to your industry/geography.

Even if you operate a single-location business in a small town and have zero plans to move, change phone numbers, hours of operation, or other data, management of citations is not a set-and-forget task. Here's why:

• Competitors and the public can edit some local business listings, enabling bad data to be published about your business. You need to be able to catch this if it occurs.
• Inaccurate data in one place naturally spreads to others. Controlling data upstream can prevent downstream flow of bad data.
• Most major citation platforms incorporate reviews into your local business listings. You need to be alerted to incoming reviews so that you can manage, analyze, and respond to this public feedback.

Even the simplest business models must be aware of and actively manage their citations. In more complex scenarios (multi-location, multi-practitioner, enterprise), ongoing active location data management is a necessity.

Additional resources

• What is a Local Citation?
• Where to Get Local Citations
• What to Do When Your Business Data Changes
• Local SEO Cheat Sheet [Free PDF Download] - Keep on top of your local SEO tasks with our free downloadable cheat sheet
• Local SEO Certification - In this six-part Certification, you’ll receive nearly six hours of on-demand, instructor-led content, covering the fundamentals, local competitor research, location data management, reputation management, and measuring and tracking success.
• In Real Life: Local SEO Tactics - In this course, local business owners learn how to get the most out of their SEO strategy using skills and knowledge they already have.
• The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide - A comprehensive beginner's guide to SEO marketing for small businesses.
• The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior | SEO Industry Report - Our local business review survey outlines key takeaways regarding the impact of reviews on consumer behavior and local business success. Learn more about the fundamentally important inclusion of online local business reviews in any local SEO strategy.