Online Citations – What are they & Why Are They Important?

Since Little Aussie Battler Directory was developed firstly as a Business Directory, this is probably the most relevant thing to talk about especially for a first blog article for our readers. You may or may not have heard of the term Business Citations before in the context of the internet and your business so this article will help you to understand more about this and the importance of online business directories to your business.

What are business citations?

In simple, online business citations are your business listings on the internet.

Examples of a Business Citation

Your business listed in LAB Directory is considered a business citation. Other common business citations that you would and should already know include Google My Business, Yellow Pages and the likes.

We’ll share some business listings that your business should be on at the of the article.

Common Problems with Business Citations

The most common problem of all is incorrect information. There are three very common reasons that we see why business citations are incorrect.

Businesses Change

Brands merge, new partners are taken on, businesses are bought and sold, rebranding exercises or new business visions and directions see big changes that happen.

Change of Business Premises

Over time especially in an older business for one reason or another, addresses change. Sometimes phone numbers change too.

SEO Companies

There are good SEO companies that put thought into your listings and there are ones SEO companies that simply rush and are focused on the link but not the content that they are placing.

How Incorrect Citations Impact You

First and foremost you need to think about your customer. Imagine you are listed in some prominent listings that are known to the general public. If it’s Google, Yellow Pages, Tru Local or even a very industry specific listing or guide that is relevant to your business that everyone reads. Now imagine your reader has heard of you before or read something that you have published. They are impressed and try to call you on your listed phone number and get a disconnected tone. Maybe they tried to click on your website link but that was to your old website and they reached a ‘website not found’ page. Maybe they were in the area and were driving to find your store or office and there was a completely different shop there or a vacant block of land. What does this tell your customer?

Well there’s a few signals that this gives to your customer:

• Maybe You’re Closed! – In the current economic environment and with how quickly things change in the modern world, it’s not uncommon to expect that businesses close down. We also live in a world where people are not necessarily wiling to search again or look hard just for your details. Or if they did search for you, they might get distracted with something else or may find a competitor more compelling.
• You don’t care! – If you don’t care enough to keep your information up to date or forward your phone number or website then maybe you don’t have enough time to care about them.

Wrong Citation Details Can Hurt Your Local SEO

Local SEO focuses on aspects like Google Maps and ranking for your local searches. Just like the real life implications of your citation having incorrect data, from a Local SEO point of view you can potentially be adversely affected by inconsistent and incorrect information. Putting on a slightly more ‘data driven’ or robot style hat on, think about it like this. You have the ability to analyze multitudes of data and out of 100 listings, a business that you are considering lists 3 different addresses, has 5 phone numbers and even the business names found has some subtle or even major differences but the other details seem to match up. How do you know which one is correct? how do you know which one is relevant? How do you know which one to pick as a result?

Sometimes the easiest solution is to move on and just pick the next best candidate that has ticked all the right boxes and has identified themselves as relevant to what one is looking for. Now this scenario is for illustration purposes but I think you get the picture thats being painted.

How To Tell if Your Business Citations are in order?

What you need to do is review where you have been listed. The key is to make sure that where you are listed from a directory point of view has up to date and consistent information about your business. Things you need to make sure are consistent include:

• Name – Your Business Name and what you are commonly known as
• Address – Unless you have multiple offices then make sure your address listings are consistent. If you do have multiple locations, then you need to make sure your citation listings are consistent to those specific locations. Don’t mix and match. It confuses everyone and I’m sure from an administrative point of view, it would confuse yourselves.
• Phone Number – Another common issue here. If you only advertise a landline, then stick with the landline. If you advertise a 1300 or 1800 number, then make sure that’s the number everywhere. There’s nothing more confusing to a customer or a robot to see multitudes of phone numbers especially if some of them don’t work.
• Opening Hours – It might seem trivial but even opening hours can get muddled up over time. Have you seen a google result where it now says ‘business is closed’ or ‘the place you are visiting might be closed when you arrive’ in google maps? This information is important.

How Do I Find My Citations?

There’s really a couple of ways you can tell where your citations are:

• Keep Records – Whether it’s an industry subscription where you share your contact information or a general online directory like us here at LAB or True Local, Yellow Pages or Google My Business, keep a list of where you are subscribed and your login and password details.
• Do a Search – This is much easier when you are a newer business because you wont be listed in many directories unless you have made the effort to do so. In which case, the earlier point of ‘keep records’ becomes more important. It becomes tricker when you are a larger business or one that has been around for a long time as there are also directories that may have discovered your business without you knowing.

Alternatively, you can organise a citation audit.

What is a Citation Audit?

A citation audit is as it sounds where an audit is conducted of your online citations. Utilising advanced search techiques across a range of search engines, a report of your current citation status showing your business Name, Address & Contact Details can be provided for your analysis. From here you can review your citations and start to take action to rectify any listings that might need some attention. If you or your staff are not confident at completing a citation audit then you can always reach out and consider Little Aussie Battlers options.

Little Aussie Battlers Citation Audit Options

Depending on your needs whether you simply want to understand where you’re at with your citations to fix up your own current listings or whether you really want to get your hands dirty and do some work to help get ahead of the competition then you can consider one of our citation audit options.

A Standard Citation Audit

For a very nominal cost, we will organise a report for you based on results from multiple advanced searches across multiple search engines compiled to provide a comprehensive citation audit of your current business listings. This option is best if you just want to gain an understanding of your citations to know how messy your listings really are or if you’re a newer business and do not necessarily have lots of citations out there but aren’t sure of your position or haven’t kept track of where you have listed your business along the way.

The Bonza Report

People who really want to go the next step and those who want to get a competitive edge for their Local SEO rankings will start with this report. You get everything in the standard report along with a citation summary, gap analysis to show where you can improve and suggestions where you can get yourself listed to help improve your visibility and rankings. This report is brilliant for those taking the first step to improving their local rankings or businesses that have been around and know that they have lots of mixed information out there but simply don’t know where to start.

What’s the Next Step?

After you get your report, what do you do with it? It’s all well and good to have all this information now but what do you do with it? Here’s some insight to what we do with the citation audits:

Citation Cleanup

This process of getting the information up to date is what we call a Citation Cleanup. Literally as it sounds, it’s cleaning up the citations of a website to make sure information out there is consistent and correct. The more correct information you have out there the happier your customers will be and search engines will also respond in kind.

The reports we provide will help you identify where you have incorrect details which will help you methodically rectify the problem citations. If you are a business that has been around for a while or have used one or multiple SEO Agencies over the years then you may find that there are listings that can’t be edited or ones that you do not have access to making it difficult to update. More often than not we find that even for ones that you do have access to, there just isn’t enough time in a day to get everything updated and this can be a lengthy process. If you are in this position, reach out and we may be able to help.

Citation Cleanup Pro Tip

With potentially hundreds and thousands of websites your business could be listed on, where do you set your benchmarks? The answer is really quite simple. Your Google My Business listing! As everyone knows google is the largest search engine which everyone uses. Google maps evolves and continues to get better with more information so this is the beast that you want to feed your information to and use as a benchmark of information for the other sites that you are listed on.

Website to get listed on

Here’s a good list to get started with if you haven’t done so already:

Apart from those listed above, there are many online directories around that you can register with. Think about your local areas, the services like newspapers or even industry specific websites. There are pages that are known for tradies like hipages that work well for citations as well as provide for lead generation. Some of these required paid options but it’s also important to know that most websites will offer a free version for you to subscribe to.