Why Citations Are Important to the Success of Your Local Business
Citations are defined as mentions of your business name and address on other webpages—even if there is no link to your website.
An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your credit union is listed, but not linked to. Citations can also be found on local chamber of commerce pages, or on a local business association page that includes your branch information, even if they are not linking at all to your website.
Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google and Bing. Other factors being equal, a branch with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than those nearby with fewer citations.
Citations also validate that a business is part of a community. It’s hard for someone to fake membership in a chamber of commerce or a city or county business index, or being written about in a local online newspaper or popular blog. Citations and links from these kinds of websites can dramatically improve your local search engine rankings.
Where to Get Citations
There are thousands of places where a citation – a mention of your credit union name and address, phone number or website – can be built for your local branch. Every credit union should focus on building a strong core of citations that not only broadens the visibility of the CU, but also strengthen search engines’ “trust” in the validity each branch’s existence. High-quality, authoritative citations are also viewed by experts as the #1 ranking factor in competitive local search markets.
Here are some excellent potential sources for citations for your branches.
Data aggregators
In the United States, there are four primary aggregators of local business data. Infogroup, Neustar Localeze, Acxiom, and Factual have all compiled unique indexes of approximately 20 million business locations across the United States. These indexes are typically compiled by scouring traditional phone books, business group membership rosters, banking and phone records, and databases from business registration entities.
In turn, these aggregators license or syndicate their data to most local search engines, including Google and Bing.
Local search engines
Local search engines like Google and Bing crawl the web for citations that will validate or correct the business information in their own indexes. Getting listed on sites like Yelp, Foursquare, Yahoo, and others can shore up search engines’ confidence in the accuracy of your branch name, location, and website.
Local blogs
Local blogs are a great place to get your branches listed – and linked to. These will obviously vary by particular geography, but if you simply perform a search on your favorite search engine for “[your city] blog” or “[your neighborhood] blog,” you’ll likely see good candidates.
Locally-focused directories
Like local blogs, local directories are well-indexed by the search engines and are highly associated with a particular city or region. Directories which are edited by a human are much better than those which are “free for all”. Human-edited directories are less susceptible to spam, and are therefore more trusted by the local search engines.
Industry-focused directories or blogs
If a website is focused on topics and keywords related to your products and services, it may be included among the sites that the local search engines count as citation sources—even if that website or directory is not focused on a particular region.
