Aug 11
12
What Are Citations? – Marketing Minute #17
Welcome to another episode of Money Making Marketing Minute, I’m your host, Brodie Tyler. Today’s topic is about citations. What are they and how can they benefit your business?
Well first of all, let me give you an example by doing a search for “PF Changs Boise”. It happens to be one of my favorite restaurants. Right here, you’ll see all the listings for their main website. But right down here is the local restaurant, the address and the phone number. And this marker indicates their location over here on the map. If I do a search for “chinese restauants boise idaho” it brings me up a bunch of results. And PF Changs shows up right here as letter D. And again it correlates over here with the map. It also has their address and phone number here. Now, if PF Changs just did a little bit more work on obtaining citations on the internet, they might be able to move up in the rankings. So there’s room for improvement.
Now what do I mean by getting more citations out there? Yelp.com is an example. It has PF Changs China Bistro listed right here with their address and their phone number. That information on other websites like Yelp.com and other local directories… those are citations. The don’t have to have the domain or a link back to the website necessarily. They just have to mention the business, the address and the phone number.
Manta.com is another place you can find citations. Here is their business name, their address, and their phone nubmer. Local.com has PF Changs listed here again. And it’s a little bit different name, PF Changs China Bistro on Manta and just PF Changs on Local. But they still have the same address and same phone number. You can also visit the website directly from Local.com.
Another example of a citation is… Actually, on InsiderPages.com PF Changs should have a citation here but they don’t. So here’s one way that the can add their business to this website, create a citation, and by doing that over and over again hopefully they can move up in the search results.
This is an example of where the business is listed but there’s no link back to their main website. PF Changs China Bistro, the address, the phone number but no website link pointing back to pfchangs.com. And it doesn’t matter. This still benefits PF Changs. Google sees this listing. It legitimizes their location… that they’re listed in Boise, that they are local. And as a result, Google and Bing and other local websites will reward PF Changs for this citation.
Again, the more citations that you have the better you’re going to rank in the search engines. Thanks for watching this video and I’ll see you on the next one!