What is a local citation?
A local citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on another website. It does not need to link to you. A listing in a business directory counts, and so does a mention in a local news story. Citations work when your details match exactly everywhere they appear.
Search for your own business and you may find it listed three ways: the road spelled out on one site, abbreviated on another, and an old phone number on a third. Each one looks harmless, but together they leave search engines less sure about you.
If you run a shop, a clinic, a workshop or a van, this is the part of link building that actually moves something for you. Search engines decide which businesses to show for a local search partly by checking that each one really exists where it says it does, and they do that by comparing what different sites say about you. Matching details in plenty of places look like a real business at a real address. Conflicting details look uncertain, and an uncertain record loses to a competitor whose records agree.
So the job is not collecting as many listings as possible. It is making sure every place your details appear says exactly the same thing, which is duller than it sounds and worth more than the links.
What are the two kinds of citation?
Structured and unstructured, and only the first kind is work you do yourself. A structured citation is a profile on a site built to hold business records, such as a directory listing, a review platform or a chamber of commerce page. The fields are laid out for you, with a place for the name, the address and the phone number. You create these yourself, and they are the ones this site lists.
An unstructured citation is your details appearing in ordinary text, such as a local news article, a sponsor list on a school website or a blog post about the neighbourhood. These count too, but you cannot manufacture them, and you are not meant to.
In practice, structured citations are the work, and unstructured ones arrive on their own when the business is real. If someone offers to sell you the second kind, treat that offer with suspicion.
Does a citation need to link to your website?
No. A citation counts whether or not it links to you, and this is where people coming from general link building often go wrong.
The value is in the statement itself: a business with this name, at this address, with this phone number, exists, and a site search engines already trust says so. A link on top is nice, but leaving it out changes very little.
That means the dofollow question, which decides so much on the web directories side, matters far less here. A nofollow listing on a well known local platform is doing its job perfectly well.
Judge citation sites on two other things instead: whether people and search engines actually refer to the platform, and whether it lets you keep your record accurate.
Why is keeping details consistent so hard?
Because every business has more versions of its own details than the owner realises. The road might be spelled out on one listing and abbreviated on another. The unit number might sit in the address line or in its own field. The company suffix might be included or dropped, the mobile might appear on some listings and the landline on others, and the country code might be there in one place and missing in the next.
Each difference looks trivial on its own. Together they turn one business into several partial records that do not quite agree, and the confidence that would have gone to one strong record gets split between them.
The fix is simple, and it is the most valuable thing you can take from this page. Write your name, address and phone number once, in one document, exactly as you want them to appear. Paste every listing you ever create from that document, and never type them out by hand.
If you already have listings out there, the old ones are usually where the problems are. Fixing what already exists tends to do more than adding new ones.
What can citations not fix?
They cannot make you the best answer for a search. Getting citations right removes a reason for search engines to doubt you, and past a certain point adding more does nothing at all.
Businesses that struggle with local visibility are rarely short of listings. More often their listings disagree, their category is set wrongly, they have no reviews, or their service area does not match where they actually work. A fortieth citation will not change any of that.
So do this once, do it properly, and then move on to the next job.
How to check this yourself
You can audit your own citations in about ten minutes, with no tool and no paid scan. Do it before you create a single new listing, because the work usually turns out to be fixing rather than adding.
- Search Google for your business name in quotation marks, followed by your town. The quotation marks force an exact match, so you get pages that name your business rather than pages about your industry.
- Open the first two pages of results and write down every site that lists you. Include the ones you do not remember creating, because aggregators copy business data between platforms, and those copies are often the out of date ones.
- For each listing, compare four things with your master version: the business name character for character, the street line, the postcode or ZIP, and the phone number including how it is formatted. Note every difference, even the ones that look too small to matter.
- Search your phone number on its own, in quotation marks. This is the most useful search of the lot, because it finds listings carrying an old business name or a previous address, which is exactly the kind of conflict you would never think to look for.
- If you have moved premises or changed number in the last few years, search the old address and the old number too, in quotation marks. Anything that comes back is still telling search engines something untrue about you.
- Fix the records you control first, starting with the ones that appear highest in those searches. Where you cannot edit a listing, most platforms offer a way to claim or correct it, and that is worth twenty minutes for the two or three that rank.
The paid citation tools do the same job as these searches. They are faster when you have a lot of listings to check, but none of them will find anything the exact match searches above would miss.
Words used above, in plain English
- NAP
- Short for name, address, phone number, the three details that make a citation a citation. When someone talks about NAP consistency, this is all they mean.
- structured citation
- Your details in a profile built to hold them, such as a directory listing, where each detail has its own field.
- unstructured citation
- Your details mentioned in ordinary writing, such as a news story or a sponsor list. These count, but you cannot manufacture them.
- aggregator
- A service that supplies business data to many other sites at once. Helpful when your record is right, and the reason one mistake can turn up on ten sites you never visited.
What this does not mean
More citations are not automatically better. Beyond the platforms that people and search engines actually refer to, extra listings add nothing, and a hundred inconsistent ones do more harm than fifteen that agree.
You also do not need to buy a citation building service. Those services create listings, which is the easy half of the job. The half that decides the result is matching what already exists, and a bulk service that skips checking your existing records can make things worse by adding yet another version of your details to the pile.
And citations are not how you win local search. Getting them right stops you losing for an avoidable reason, while reviews, categories and actually being open when you say you are do more.
Questions people ask about this
Do I need a physical address to do this?
Mostly yes. If you have no premises and no local phone number, citations are not the right route for you, and the general web directories page is the one you want. Some platforms accept a service area business with a hidden address, but a business with no address at all has no citation problem to solve.
Does the listing have to link to my website?
No. A citation counts on the mention of your name, address and phone number alone, and a link is a bonus. That is why the dofollow question, which matters so much on the rest of this site, matters much less on the citation pages.
What if two listings disagree and I cannot edit one of them?
Fix everything you control first, then work through the ones you cannot edit in order of how prominently they appear when you search your own name. Most platforms have a claim or correction process. It is worth using for the two or three that rank, and not worth an afternoon for the rest.
How long before this makes a difference?
Weeks rather than days, and you will notice it as problems gradually going away rather than as a sudden jump. Do not expect a visible ranking change from citation cleanup alone. It removes a handicap rather than adding an advantage.