The Case Of The Invisible Local Citation
Hey everyone, I’m here and I want to share an observation, a lot of citations just aren’t having a noticeable effect on the local SERPs like they used to. So we wondered why. Citations ARE brand mentions after all, and brand mentions ARE an integral part of PROMINENCE, a top local GMB ranking factor.
We Weren't The Only One Noticing A Decrease In Citation Effectiveness
Local SEO Guide’s 2017 compilation of ranking factors shows citations way down near the bottom of the list this year. I like this Local Ranking Factors guide much better than Moz, somehow Moz’s always seemed skewed in favor of their services and those of the main author D.S. Personally when you have optimized as many listings as we do each year, you quickly learn how to spot what is working and what isn’t. Citations just weren’t a game changer, in fact, most of the time they had a negligible effect on local rankings.
So Why Are Citations Getting Such A Bad Rap?
Brand Links And Mentions From Authority Domains
We wondered this repeatedly. For a long time, citations were the holy grail of local SEO. In fact, still to this day, if you ask a lot of digital marketers, they will tell you citations are a top ranking factor, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Did the local algorithm suddenly do an about face? It seems counterintuitive when brand prominence remains one of the 3 cardinal methods of increasing Google Maps rankings. Even Google says so themselves, prominence is one of the 3 ways local rankings are determined.
Online brand prominence consists of a business’s links, articles, directories, brand mentions, and other online activity. Citations clearly are a component of brand prominence. They are the epitome of a brand mention in a directory site.
Well, there’s a very big clue in Google’s local ranking post as to why your citations aren’t working for local SEO. Brand prominence, Google states is, “based on information that Google has about a business from across the web.”
Where does Google store its information about a brand? It stores it in the active index. That’s why prominent brands quickly pull-up a knowledge graph when you search for them. It is the collection of data about a business formatted using mark-up and kept in the active index.
If your citations aren’t being found by Google and indexed. You are not receiving credit for those brand mentions and directory listings for local search. Local search is a different algorithm than search, and while you may receive credit for a link or mention when it is first crawled by Gbot, you won’t receive credit towards brand prominence if Google doesn’t even know your citations exist much less can find them in the active index.
See Why Their Citations Won't Index
Increase Brand Prominence For Local SEO
You can see by using unique content in each citation that you build and then hand-submitting the citation to Google Submit URL Tool, you can effectively increase citation indexing rates from 300% to 500%.
In our example above we saw similar looking citations but without unique content indexing at 20% or less. While our citations that used unique content indexed at over 90%. This is a tremendous difference. And can have a real impact on local SEO.
If only 20% of your brand’s listings and mentions are indexing, but a competitor is indexing at 70 or 80 percent it is very obvious which company Google is going to assume has better local prominence.
Watch As We Test Our Citations For Indexation
Why Aren't Duplicate Citations Indexing As Well?
There are a few reasons why mass-produced citations aren’t indexing as well as they used to. Even for premium $4 citations in our example above from WhiteSpark, where the citations were completed optimized and built out with images and media, there was still a noticeable lack of uniqueness to them.
Quality citations have become a basic commodity in local SEO. Everyone is ordering citations. They are creating a descriptive paragraph and copying and pasting that across 50, 100, or 200 directory listings. The exact same paragraph, repeated over and over again. Duplicate content is the bane of Google Search Index.
Every item in the index costs Google money. Google has a financial motive to only index unique content, and this includes local citations and business listings. That’s why even when you use duplicate content you can usually only get the citations that have multiple images or a map embed or some type of unique feature to properly index and stay indexed.
To truly succeed in local SEO you can no longer rely on citations with duplicate content to build brand prominence if they aren’t staying indexed. You need to fill up Google’s index with quality brand mentions and links to the business and a great way to do that is by using unique content on each listing.
Key Takeaways
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Standard Index Best Practices Apply To Citations
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More Unique Content Directly Affects Index Rate
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Low Quality Duplicate Content Will Be Harder To Index
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The More Indexed Brand Mentions The More Prominence
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Greater Brand Prominence Leads To Better Rankings
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Add Unique Content To Every Citation
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Submit Each Citation To Google Submit URL Tool
Create A Competitive Advantage
As the local search algorithm becomes more complex and more mature, local SEO’s need to begin thinking about the quality of the brand signals they are creating. If your competitors are getting their citations to index at 70% to 95%+ but you are still stuck at 20% to 30% you are at an automatic disadvantage. Local search requires every advantage you can get.
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