What Are Google Places Citations And Are They Important?
What are Google Places Citations?
Google Places citations site at the bottom of your Google Places page under the heading More about this place, they display other websites which have mentioned your business these can include directory listings, news stories and articles. Citations are not something you can add to your page yourself, Google adds them to your listing as it crawls the web. When Google finds a citation or reference to your site you receive a point, you get this point even if that site fails to link directly to you. The more points you have the higher you will rank. Google recognises a combination of factors such as your business name, address, phone number and many others as a citation.
So thats what a citation is, so why are they important for SEO?
Citations act as a vote of confidence in your listing, therefore citations from authoritative sites are worth more than less authoritative ones, for instance a link from your local chip shops website is not going to be worth the same as a link from your local Chambers of Commerce. This means that quality is far more important than volume. Having citations therefore has a positive effect on your Google Places ranking and should be considered an important element of your local SEO campaign.
How to Influence your Google Places Citations
So as mentioned above, Google selects which citations appear on your Google Places page, so you have no influence, right?
Not quite.
There are a number of things you can do to influence which sites provide citations which Google can index. One way would be to check out the competition, have a look at those listings which rank highly for your search terms. Make a note of their citation sources. Now visit those sites and see if you can also get a citation. This will help, but if youre simply copying the competition then how are you going to beat them when everything is the same? You need to go above and beyond. Identify local industry relevant, authoritative sites that are likely to link to your site. Approach the owner and request a review or listing on their site.
Another method could be to approach customers or suppliers that are industry relevant and ask them to provide a review or listing on their site as well. Use PR to get stories and news listed on local or national press sites, these always carry good authority in Googles eyes.
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