When you’re a local business owner, focusing on listings/citations needs to be your first priority for online marketing. We wanted to know which citation tools find favor with SEO professionals. This led us to conduct a poll on microblogging site Twitter. Before you know the outcome, let’s brush up the basics.
What is local citation?
Local citation is the primary information of local businesses and mainly includes NAP or Name, Address and Phone Number. The citations exist on local business directories, are mentioned on websites, apps and social channels. It is crucial for users to locate businesses near their location and affects the search engine rankings of the businesses.
How Can local citation help ranking?
When you search for any local business on Google, you’ll find that the top results are all from high quality citation sites. To increase your chances of showing up on these sites, you need to get your business listed immediately and verify them. This can effectively boost your rankings.
How can local citation audit help your business?
Local citations are often scattered on the internet with discrepancies in the data. This leads to major confusion among potential customers. It can also adversely affect the search engine rankings.
A local SEO audit can also include local citation audit, which enables you to:
- Check the accuracy of NAP on Google My Business Listing
- Check the consistency of NAP data on the web
- Discover misleading information about your business
- Identify duplicate listings
- Reach customers easily as they’ll be able to find your business
- Establish a web presence and enhance online visibility on search engines irrespective of whether you’ve a website for your business or not
What Are The Tools For Managing Citations? How To Choose Them?
More often than not, businesses have citations on multiple sources, which can be a mix of correct and incorrect information. When these incorrect listings run into thousands, it is difficult to clean them up manually due to lack of time or manage them perfectly. Citation management tools make this task easier for business owners.
Because there are several tools and everyone has their favorites, we conducted this quick Twitter poll to get first-hand information.
We asked them to choose their favorite citation management tools and offer other options not mentioned in the poll in a separate Tweet.
The survey result revealed that most of the voters had a strong preference for Moz Local at 43%, whereas BrightLocal came in second at 23%. WhiteSpark was a close third with 20% votes and Yext getting 14%.
Obviously, people had their favorites.
In addition to this, local SEO expert Shane Barker wrote us an email, naming his favorite citation management tool, which is WhiteSpark. Here’s what he had to say:
“It’s a very comprehensive tool that you can use to quickly find some of the best local citations that you need to enhance your local SEO efforts. I love the specific focus it has on tracking local ranking rather than just tracking overall ranking. It lets you track ranking across local pack, organic search, and local finder as well as maps.”
Our survey also shed light on ‘WHY’ people preferred a certain tool:
BrightLocal was recommended because it automates the finding and submission process. It was also mentioned as fluid, user-friendly with amazing speed and detail.
MozLocal found favor because of its simplicity and because it requires minimal training to get started with. The tool with a great user-interface is extremely reliable.
Both BrightLocal and WhiteSpark have some distinct features and have made some remarkable improvements over the last few years.
Yext uses your business’s listings, pages, reviews and more to put it on several different local directories. This helps increase your rankings on Google.
More Insights on citation audit and tools
| Tools | Features and Benefits |
|---|---|
| PlacesScout | PlacesScout is immensely helpful for auditing and verifying your business’ NAP (name, address, phone) consistency on major listing and directory sites.
By using the tool, you’ll be able to decide whether you need to go for a listing syndication service like Yext or not. The tool also offers multi-location listing summary views, which offers aggregate summary metrics across various locations. |
| G2 Crowd | G2 Crowd is a B2B software and services review site with 440,000+ user reviews across different SaaS tools and services. It’s essentially a research tool for finding new software.
They have organic search categories that roundup all the different software tools available in those spaces with reviews from users. Their two best resources for SEO professionals include their local SEO software and their overall SEO software category. |
| Synup | Synup is an incredible citation management tool, which crawls the web to get rid of duplicate listings. It scans listings to detect inaccuracies in business information along with identifying sites for possible citation.
The tool can also fix the wrong information on the listings and enhance them with details such as social channels, business hours, menus and media. Worried about the hard work of pushing the listings to major directories? Synup got you covered as it automatically pushes listings to major directories. |
| N.A.P. HUNTER! | N.A.P. HUNTER! by Local SEO Guide is a Chrome extension tool. You can use the tool to perform searches for different combinations of your business’s NAP information, get the citation profile and download it as a .csv file. |
| BrightLocal | BrightLocal helps track local citation, spot inaccurate NAP issues and discover new citation sites. The tool offers a 14-day Free Trial, using which you can easily find the existing local citations and notice the powerful sites. It also helps locate harmful and duplicate listings. The tools works great to find citation opportunities and manage citation building. |
| Yext | Incorrect business listings will be outdated with Yext. The tool has direct integrations with maps, apps, search engines, and social networks. This ensures that your business locations are easy to find by customers.
Yext guarantees accuracy and offers real-time control of the listings without the need of manual updates. The tool verifies the status of listings and lets you know when each of them is live. These are just a handful of features the tool brings to the table. Apart from them, there are several metrics useful for your business. |
| Whitespark | Whitespark helps you review opportunities to find best citations and build new listings. It has a compare feature that lets you analyze your competitors’ citations, where you can add several businesses to your search. This will help you identify and explore citation profiles. You can also use the tool to search targeted keyphrases and never miss out any potential citation source. We love the user interface of the tool and how it helps us monitor citation growth. |
| MozLocal | MozLocal helps measure the quality and accuracy of your business’s or brand’s local listings. It works for both small businesses and large enterprises, offering them a seamless experience when it comes to checking online listings.
P.S. Before using the tool, you need to get your business listing verified on Google or Facebook. |
This was our survey on citation management tools along with the findings. What are your thoughts on it? Have a favorite citation tool? Let us know in the comments.
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