8 Free Must Have Citations For Your Business To Be On Equal Playing Field

Hello everyone,

Today I would like to share a few things that I have learned from a webinar I attended this week. The topic of the webinar was regarding what are some of the best practices to obtain citations for local businesses. When it comes to the top 4 ranking factors for websites, citations are ranked as the 3rd most important variable. Keep in mind that the top 4 ranking factors are what our community of SEO service professionals have identified from thousands of ranking factors. It should by no means be neglected or underestimated. 

In this particular post, I would like to give you the best practices to secure the most common yet strong citations for your business. It may seem obvious, however it is essential that these tasks are carried out as the bare minimum to compete in your local industry.

When you create a business website, one of the first actions should be to validate the authenticity of your business and its connection to the domain. Simply speaking, citations are call outs from other platforms that cite your business with its address, domain, phone number, and name. So when search engines crawl through the web, it validates the existence of your business. Because it is similar to a physical validation, citations are also a key factor for Google My Business rankings. 

I personally recommend creating a google business page first, followed by the accounts mentioned below not in any particular order:

Yelp

LinkedIn

YouTube

Yellow Pages

FB Fan page

Instagram

Twitter

When these accounts are created, be sure to fill out all the information possible, especially address, domain, phone number, and name of business. If you do not have a physical location, city location also works. After you have created these accounts, the next step is to intertwine the different platforms and linking them to one another. For example, on LinkedIn, make sure to add the other platforms links to your profile or fill in the boxes that LinkedIn provides for your other accounts. 

On YouTube, post two quick introductory videos that explain your service or business. These can be 30 sec videos. The goal is to post so that Google, who owns YouTube, will further authenticate that you are indeed a business and are looking for more exposure. A neat tie-in is to also include links to your other social media accounts within the description of the video. 

Then, rinse and repeat the process until you have at minimum posted 2 times on each platform with some mention of your service and links to other platforms. In doing this, you should have 8 citations including google business. This should boost the authenticity of your business and promote your business to appear in search results.

As a bonus note, I personally suggest keeping up with Facebook and LinkedIn posts at a minimum frequency of 2 times a week. It would increase the relevancy of your business, along with a positive effect for ranking. At LSL, we provide citation services starting at 100 citations besides the mentioned platforms at an affordable price! to Contact us now to evaluate your competitors and learn how you can stay ahead them on number of citations.