Citation Research

Join Mary Bowling and David Mihm in this lesson about citation research.

We're going to talk about why citations are important, how to take advantage of the work that's already been done for you in citation research, how to ignite your citation research with the Whitespark tool, how to use Google to help you with your citation research, how to use Excel in a power user way to organize your citation research, and also finding diamonds in the rough, looking for those citations that are really going to help you outrank your competitors.

What is a Citation?

When we talk about citations we’re referring to name, address, phone number, and website in some combination out on the web. These are crawled by Google. One could call them your business' thumbprint out on the web.

Traditional directory citations are where it's very obvious that that is your name, address, and phone number. Unstructured citations occur where your name, phone number, your URL may be mentioned somewhere on the web in an unorganized way, but the search engines can still pick up and attribute it to you.

Citation Providers

Infogroup is a very important citation provider. If you submit to Infogroup, your information will get spread to many websites. Axiom is another citation provider or data provider that will distribute to these networks. Neustar Localeze push their information out to other websites.

Check Before Submitting Citations

When you're doing these submissions, you want to make sure your information is not already present on these sites and that it's correct. If it's not there, then you submit it. Each of them has a pretty simple way of checking and submitting.

There are also tier two citations that are good for just about any business out there. So once you've submitted to the data providers and let them spread your citations across the Internet, if you want to take it a step further, you should move on to tier two citation sources, which are good for just about any business. You can also use the GetListed tool to help you see where you might already be listed and where you are lacking listings. That tool will also coach you through getting listings or correcting listings.

Consistency

As far as your citation criteria, consistency is a huge issue. Citations research is all about making sure that you have really consistent citations out all across the web. You want to make sure that you're using authority sites, that are vertically relevant or relevant for your particular industry, and that they're also geographically relevant or relevant for your particular location.

We've already done a lot of the research for you on some of these vertically relevant and geographically relevant citations. These are published on GetListed.org.

Citation Finder

If you've done all of you citation submission, go one step further with your citation building. We recommend that you use Whitespark's Local Citation Finder. You want to start with that by creating a project so that you can keep all your citation research about one business together in one place.

You're going to search by key phrase, give the tool your location, your business name, and also your key phrase that you want it to do research for you on. Your search results are going to be delivered back to you in a way that you can export them into a spreadsheet and slice and dice them any way you want.

One of the most useful things about the spreadsheet; is you can sort by Moz Domain Authority, and it can help you prioritize which citations are probably most important for you to deal with first. The more that you use this tool and the more that you work within a vertical, the easier it becomes for you to pinpoint where the best citations might be for you.

This tool gives you citation hubs so you can look at all of the top ranking businesses and the local pack together and compare their citations, see what outliers there might be, see where you might be able to also get citations. When you use projects, you can combine several searches together for different terms related to that business and get the citation research in one big spreadsheet.

Look at Google for Citations

Use Google to figure out what are the most important citations for any particular business. You want to do this by just searching for the business name, address, and phone number then look at the search results, because we are assuming that those are probably ranked in the order that Google thinks are the most important citations for that business.

Check and see which sites Google probably thinks are most important for you to get reviews from. If you go to the local pack and you hover over the map pins and see the fly outs on the side of the page, then you can look and see which review sites Google is quoting down there at the bottom of those pages.

Size Up the Competition

If you're in a competitive market, I like to also check which citations are good for other businesses in other competitive markets and try to get some clues there of some things that maybe my competitors are missing from my industry. Look at Google to see who ranks for the fat head terms that you're looking for. Additionally, this is also a good place where folks are looking for your type of business.

SERP Research

The Mozbar you can actually export a lot of these search results into a CSV file. Get friendly with Excel and really dive into the sites that are going to make a difference, especially on the authority side of thing. Looking at Domain Authority and seeking highly trusted top level domains, like .org, .edu, .k12 with your state extension.

Those are the citations that we like to call diamonds in the rough, that are extremely well-trusted by Google. They're going to have a lot of Domain Authority, so Google likes to see those; the thumbprint of your business. Try to get a link from those sites, even if they just offer a typical directory or write an article about your business and mention your business name with your phone number. These can all go a long way with your local rankings.

Analyze Your Citation Research

We like to compile a bigger spreadsheet of more than just my own market and assign a ranking score based on who's ranking for those searches. After you've organized your list of domains, not only from the geographic research that you've done across various markets, you've sorted them by domain authority, you've pulled in your list that Whitespark has given you, that's when I like to use Excel and go after the .orgs, .edus, .k12s and see which sites show up.