You may have completed all formalities required to include some citations, optimized your website, collected client reviews, and included local links to improve local ranking. However, you need to go beyond local rankings and focus on improving user experience, provide a fantastic shopping experience for your clients, and divert prospective conversions to deserving vendors.You should begin your citation building exercise by make sure that you have provided precise and consistent NAP, i.e. Name, Address, and Phone number to all related sites. This data should be the same on your business website, on your Google Plus page, and across all other related locations to ensureimproved local rankings.
You can use services such as Yext to make sure that your business listings are displayed consistently on several directories. However, this service is certainly not cheap at around $500 per year even though the provided information might appear instantly on some of the desired directories and within a few days on others.
On the other hand, you can try setting up your own Google Spreadsheet once you gather all required data to help you in tracking your listings. You can use Roboform or utilize a similar tool. You can then build the right citations for your specific needs.
One tip is to keep the NAP data of your client at the top of the Google doc that you have made. This way, you can ensure consistency by merely copy/pasting that data when you build citations. You can also utilize that same Google Doc to track the sources of your citations.
Your spreadsheet or document must include crucial information fields such as your Actual Name, your Business Name, Address, Local Phone Number, Email Address, Suite Number, Floor, City, State, Zip Code, and finally, the Landing Page leading to your Business Address. In addition, you can also add fields such as your Facebook Address, Twitter Handle, Business Logo URL, your 800 Number, and a link to your Google+ Local Page.
If you seem to have trouble in citation building, then you should try out Roboform. Depending on the services utilized, you may need to spend between around $10 and $40. Roboform will take your manual input of any location and autofill a lot of data on many submission sites. It does require manual tracking, but can save a lot of time and effort since you can save that information and share it with your team.
Once you have installed Roboform from Roboform.com, you can install it quickly and begin using the tool. You will need to create a New Identity by going to File, then New, and then to Identity. You can create a new identity for each of your business locations and then click on Edit to fill up all information that you desire to display. In case you are aiming to build citations, you may only fill up the sections related to Person, Business, and Business.
In the Person Section, you should fill up the First Name, Last Name, business Phone number, and Email address that you want displayed on your listing.
In the Business Section, make sure that you fill up the fields mentioning Company Name and Website. The mentioned company name should be the same that exists on your NAP Worksheet while the Website should be the landing page of the actual physical location of that business.
Finally, you need to go to the Address Section to fill up your business address in the NAP format.
You can now begin your citation building exercise by checking if you are listed on specific websites and adding your listing on those that do not feature it. You must ensure that your listings are consistent to your NAP data as well as accurate. You can create a template that allows you to glance at all your citation building data in the form of a list. You must track and update this data at all times since it can be especially useful in case of any change in your company information such as address, telephone number, etc.
You can get top citation sources from helpful websites such as Getlisted.org. You can view Top Citation Sources either by Category or by City and can add or update your listing based on your specific requirements.
In addition, you also need to view how your competitors rank locally and can use different tools to do the same. You can use Whitespark from Whitespark.ca to view competitor citations with ease.
You can begin by clicking on Your Projects on the right side of your screen in the Local Citation Finder section. Next, go to Create a New Project and feed in your business name and phone number before clicking on the Create a New Project. You can then seek out citation sources by way of keywords when you click on Search by Keyphrase and feed in the keyword information for which you require the ranking.
You should get the results within a few minutes and will also receive the confirmation of results on your email upon completion of the process. Once the results are displayed, you need to click on your projects link to view all your projects and click on the citation sources displayed in pink color. Whitespark has made it easy for you by additionally compiling the site submissions URLs in the results data.
You can then click on Submit your Business to get listed on the chosen website and can utilize RoboForm to automate the filling process to a large extent with autofill.
Another great citation building method is to use Google to fill in the NAP information of your competitors taken from their Google Plus Local page. Next, you can go to the same sources as your competition after looking at the search results and submit your listing in case you are allowed to do so. In case some sites do not allow submissions or belong to the competitor then you can tick the Useless option displayed in your Whitespark listing report to ensure that you have time-saving and precise data at your fingertips.
While concluding these above tips, we would like you to be cautious in case you decide to outsource your citation building campaign. In case you or your team does not have precise data at your fingertips or do not have the time to personally monitor the campaign then this could result in a disastrous campaign that will require a lot of time, effort, and money to rectify.