Most business owners would have at some stage pondered over whether starting a business blog is worth their time. Well...
Citation Building with BrightLocal
In a previous blog post we discussed the difference between links and citations, and the importance of both for your website visibility. A quick recap:
Links use hypertext to create a selectable connection from a word, phrase or image to another webpage or application – just like how in the opening sentence of this blog the words “previous blog” are linked to another blog post.
Citations are references to your business name, address and phone number (referred to as NAP) on other websites, not necessarily included a link, most
often just in plain text. For example: Cloud 9 Online, Suite 2, 38 Brookhollow Ave, Baulkham Hills, NSW 2153, (02) 9114 9925
These are both important because search engines like Google use evidence of links and citations to evaluate the quality of your website, and thus direct traffic your way. The idea in a nutshell being that the more websites who cite or link to your website, the more valuable your website must be to those who visit it.
Considering that Google is thought to account for as much as 40% of all internet traffic, it is pretty important to consider their ranking factors if you want to optimise your website’s visibility online!
Citation Building
Citation building refers to actively seeking to increase the amount of websites who are citing your business. The obvious source of a citation is a business directory or listing website, such as notable examples, YellowPages, Yelp, FourSquare and TripAdvisor.
Most of these business directory sites are free to list on, and aside from the advantages this provides to your Google rankings, there is also the obvious benefit of helping people find your business through these directories.
Having said that, there is a fine art to citation building. To get the best results, it is important to optimise the content you’re placing on these sites and ensure that the content is consistent across all citations. There can also be time-consuming verification/sign-up processes.
Introducing BrightLocal Citation Building Services
At Cloud9, we partner with industry leading citation building professionals in BrightLocal. BrightLocal allows you to pick their database of over 1,600 national, local and niche citation sites, and then they manually do the citation building work for you.
Benefits of BrightLocal Citation Building
- Gives you access to a wide range of powerful, local and industry specific business directories, many of which you may not otherwise be aware of
- Save time inputting data and completing registrations for citations across numerous listing sites
- Ensures consistency across all citations, as you only enter your content to BrightLocal once, and then they use that content to build all of your citations
- Updates existing citations
- Creates citations with important search engine listings like Google My Business and Bing Local
- Removals harmful duplicate citations
- Provides one central location for managing all citations, with regular reports that keep you up to date on the status and success of your citation building campaign.
See example BrightLocal campaign report here.
Over the years, Cloud9 have developed a strong understanding of how to best take advantage of BrightLocal’s citation building services, and have experience setting-up and managing citation building campaigns for our clients.
For further information or advice on how BrightLocal citation building campaigns can help improve your business's visibility online, or if you’d like to learn more about how Cloud9 can help you with citation and or link building strategy, contact us today by filling out the enquiry form below.
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