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 discussed your enterprise most of these can include directory listings, news stories and articles. Citations are not something you can add to your current 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 onto you. The more locations you have  the higher you will rank. Google recognises a combination of things such as your business name, address, phone number and many others as a citation. This is crucial as Google will try to correlate that information with other citations and reviews across the Internet.

So that is what a citation is, so why are they important for SEO?

Citations act as a vote of confidence in the listing, therefore citations from authoritative sites deserve more than less authoritative ones, for instance a link from any local chip shop's website is not going to be worth the same as a link from your local Chambers of Commerce. This means that high quality is far more important than level. Having citations therefore has a positive effect on your Google Places ranking and should be considered an important element of your local Website positioning campaign.

How to Influence your Google Places Citations

So as mentioned previously, 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 you're simply copying the competition then how are you going to beat them when everything is the same? It is important for you to go above and beyond. Identify local industry relevant, authoritative sites that are likely to link to your site. Approach|Tackle|Contact|Method|Advance|Strategy} the owner and request a review or listing on their site. Another method could be to approach customers or suppliers that are enterprise relevant and ask them to provide a review or listing on their site as well. Use PR to get stories and also news listed on local or national press sites, most of these always keep good authority in Google's view.

First on our list of factors which will affect your Google Places citations and their impact on your local SEO efforts, is the authority from the referencing site. The more authority Google places in the site which hosts your citation then the greater its worth is to your site. Citations from low ranking, poorly constructed sites will, for example, be inferior to a listing on a local government listing. In this sense, a competitor with 5 high authority citations will outrank you even should you have twice the amount of citations from low authority sites.

The second factor to consider is the level of detail contained in the citation. A site that lists your business and includes your business title and website only is not going to be as effective as a citation which also includes your phone number, fax number, full address and postcode. This having said that, can have an impact on the third factor, consistency.

Your citations must be consistent and contain the same information if possible. If one citation lists your business as being ABC Company, XYZ Avenue, City 123 and another lists you as simply BCA Company, City 234 and another has Business Name, ABC then there is a lack of consistency in Google's eyes which makes the citations less powerful than if they complemented one another. This is even more important when you have multiple phone numbers or locations. Select one number for use in each location, ensure no other numbers are published to the and set up a different Montreal Google Places listing for each business with a local variation on your business name.

The fourth factor is relevance. Your citations need to be from local, industry relevant sources. If you are based in Cardiff then try to get listed in as many business directories with a 'Cardiff' section as possible. 

Approach Cardiff based suppliers for a listing on their site, try to acquire a listing on any industry union, band or authority sites that have a local section.

Citations can be a powerful SEO tool in a Google Places or local optimisation campaign, but to get the best from your citations you should consider these factors.

OnethirdMarketing is a Montreal SEO company specializing in cutting-edge search engine placement methodologies for business