Build Your Local SEO With These Free Listings
Adding your business to local citations plays a major part of your overall Local SEO rank. Finding citations can be pretty time consuming, especially when you’re trying to weed out the poor quality links, harmful listings and generally low quality sites, don’t worry, we’re here to help.
Our team have years of experience building local business’ SEO, using a combination of tools, including local citations and business listings and we’ve put together the perfect list to get you started.
Registering your business with these local citations (or business listing sites) will pay dividends when it comes to showing up in potential customers ‘Service in Location’ searches, so it’s well worth putting a few hours aside, grabbing a cuppa and getting stuck in.
Why Are Local Citations Important?
Building citations for your business is one of the simplest ways you can optimize for local SEO. Having a strong and accurate citation profile can help increase your ability to be found online, and get more customers through your door.
Improving Local Search Engine Rankings
Registering your business with local listing sites is one of the easiest ways to improve your local SEO and optimise your business, to develop more enquiries online. Maintaining an accurate, relevant and up to date online profile can vastly improve your organic rankings, particularly when users make ‘Service in Location’ searches (such as ‘Driving Lessons in Sheffield’) which are displayed in Google’s ‘Local Pack’.
The result, better quality traffic, in bigger numbers, resulting in more leads!
Establish Your SEO
Registering with local citations should be your starting point for SEO. Once you have registered on all relevant sites, you can focus on long term organic traffic, improving keyword rankings and building back links to maximise your online presence.
We’ve found that building your local citations acts as a springboard for other activity, with Google indexing new pages and content that little bit more quickly. In short, local citations can boost long term SEO too!
Build Authority
Customers want to work with trusted companies, your presence on local listings and industry relevant sites helps build that trust. As well as building confidence with your potential customers, you’re also building up trust with search engines like Google and Bing too!
If your site isn’t listed on any citation sites, search engines can be a little skeptical as to how authentic your business really is; adding your profile to trusted sites shows that a) You’re serious about your business and b) You have nothing to hide. This means your website will be chucked ‘into the mix’ more often when it comes to displaying local organic results.
How To Register Local Citations
Registering local citations is pretty straight forward; simply follow the links and register your NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number), making sure to maintaining consistency throughout each listing.
Some sites may ask you to confirm your email address before listing, or even require a scheduled call, to ensure your business is legitimate. Beware, some calls, particularly from directories which have online advertising can be dressed up as a ‘confirming your business’ call, when in reality it’s an opportunity for them to sell you advertising packages.
In most cases, it pays to stand firm, unless they offer an amazing deal, there’s not much benefit in using directory advertising when you can focus your time and money elsewhere.
What is NAP?
NAP stands for ‘Name, Address and Phone Number’. It’s important that you register your NAP accurately and with consistency, keeping it as near as possible on every listing site.
Don’t worry if there’s some deviation, it’s not the end of the world (search engines are cleverer than that) or if you need to change some details in future; most citation sites will let you update your details at a later stage.
The Best Local Citations In Sheffield
What Is A Citation?
A citation is a listing or mention of your business, business information or website anywhere online and can include or exclude a link. Citations can include any part or all of your business information, such as your entire Name, Address and Phone Number, or something as small as just your name!
Building Your Local SEO
Registering your local citations isn’t the only thing you need to do to maximise your local SEO, check out our comprehensive Local SEO Guide, which gives you a great starting point, helping get your business ranking locally and generating those all important enquiries!
The Wrap Up
Local citations are a key contributor to your local organic rankings, so, whilst they can be pretty time consuming, they’re well worth persevering with. As searches become more savvy (with search engines following suit), it pays to connect with potential customers on ever more specific terms, resulting in more niche traffic and higher conversion rates.
We’re always banging on about local SEO because it really is the leveller between small and big businesses; you can master local search, no matter how small your budget, it just takes effort.
We’d love if you could share our blog, helping your business friends find this list too! Don’t forget to share, using the buttons below. Oh and, we may have mentioned, we’re pro’s at Local SEO, speak to us if you need help with yours.
