Citation building is one of the most important (and most boring) items to execute and keep track of in SEO.
Even when a customer’s citations are fully up to date, things can change.
Phone numbers, owners, email addresses – all seemingly minor things change regularly without everyone on the team knowing. So, to be proactive, here is a three-step process to review your customer’s citations.
1) Before anything else, go to Moz Local and plug in your customer’s name and zip code. This will give you the biggest players online:
- Bing
- And much more
And show you if there are duplicates or issues out there related to a customer’s citations. If you see something that doesn’t look right ask a member of the SEO team – it’s rarely ever as bad as it may seem (it’s a free tool and Moz locks some of the functionality behind its paid version/tries to scare you into paying them).
2) A lot of sites you can’t update on your own.
That is because they are with a program called Yext – think of it like a union of the Yellowpages and Whitepages of the world, along with the hundreds of small guys out there. Yext costs $500 a year to take care of this, and when you terminate your contract they undo the work they did or scrub you off the Internet entirely (seriously – we’re talking closing GMB, Facebook, etc).
Many of these citation sites rely on four major data aggregators. Kind of like a credit bureau but much more boring. Here are direct links to update listings, which are then shared all across the web. This won’t be an instant process, but by going to the source you can avoid shelling out hundreds/thousands of dollars (at the tradeoff that it may take months to see any changes).
- InfoGroup: http://www.expressupdate.com/search
- Factual: http://www.factual.com/contact/update_add_business
- Acxiom: https://mybusinesslistingmanager.myacxiom.com/
- Neustar Localeze: https://www.neustarlocaleze.biz/small-business-services/ (Note: This aggregator costs $79/year. Be aware that it exists, but we don’t recommend doing this until you see if the others take care of the majority of your problems.)
These links can be passed along to your customers if they’re savvy enough to handle it on their own. Before jumping in and doing it, another option is to communicate to a customer of the need up front and then charging them for the time required to add these citations on the various sites. This isn’t a service we offer and we don’t want to get in the business of internally handling citations.
3) OPTIONAL: There are advanced techniques to root out those stubborn citations that are still out there. If you are so inclined, or if you consistently hear from a customer that people go to the wrong place/call the wrong number, you can follow the steps from Moz by using advanced search queries. This is especially helpful if the customer knows the wrong number and you can help them find where people are tying them to it on the web.