Internet is a vast and infinite repository of data where a single keywords returns you millions of search results. With each passing day businesses are booming and numbers of brands are increasing. This increase has resulted in a situation where many brands and businesses are named similarly. So the question arises how to look for a specific business and how to make sure that it is the one you are looking for.
Citation building comes to our rescue in a situation like this. Technically speaking citation is an exact reference to your work or business around the internet and it gives the accurate and correct information about your business and the services you are providing based on the location specific search results.
Citation building in business terminology refers to the increasing the visibility and mention of your business on location specific portals, websites and directories. Citation building involves associating NAP (name, address, phone number information of your business with the search engine results. These citations may include the exact purpose of your website, address as well as the phone number.
As the number of citations about your business increase in a location more and more people will come to know about the services you are offering and this may further lead to increase of your sales as well. On the other hand as the number of citations increase your business will be well recognized and will be listed with higher priority in the localized search engine results. As a whole it will help to increase the overall online presence of your business.
Poor citation building or ignoring it will severely affect the business and will prove detrimental in the long run. Although citation building is the hardest part of the business strategy but it is always worth breaking sweat over it.
How to Use Citation Building for SEO
Citation building is all about search engines referencing and listing that your business or website is relevant to a specific location and is offering some particular service. Good citation building is very important for Search Engine optimization as it well help your business to be located exactly. For that to happen, you must prefer quality over quantity and list almost all details about your business included in NAP i.e. Name, Address and Phone Number.
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The NAP includes complete information about your business like the name of your business, geographic location, working hours, phone number among other things to eliminate the confusion stemming from similarly named brands and businesses. For efficient citation building you need to list your business on data aggregating websites and location specific horizontal directories.
Apart from that Google MapMaker is a great way to search about your business and this helps you to eliminate any earlier duplicate entries. Citations must include the most proper business category for your business as search engines do not tend to display the results that are not categorized properly.
You should yourself try searching for your business after building the citations as it will give you an idea, how the citations might appear to the people who might be searching for your business and help you in the long rum to further improve these to get wider recognition and getting better rankings on the search engine results.
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