Citations and Customer Reviews are super important to outrank your competitors in your Google Places business listing, now called Google+ Local pages.
Citations are any mentions of your business details, called “NAP” for short: business name, business address and business phone number.
You have to go through this list for possible citation spots to submit your business details to. These guys have done some super extensive research to come up with this time saving and well organized list.
Citations are basically votes for the legitimacy of your business on other websites. One of the most important signals used by Google to measure your local business compared to others in your category.
This tells Google that…
- the more you have
- from more authoritative sources and
- from more sources that relate to your industry
…then you are more trustworthy than a competitor who doesn’t have any or as many citations.
So go to that list and copy the sites that are useful for your business category and the ones that are used across the board and good hunting.
Oh… the importance of proper NAP info across the web can’t be understated- so don’t change your business information, always keep everything the same.
Good post. Short, but good.
I’ve been trying to find what improves rankings in the 7-box. Basically, instead of backlinks, all you need is for a website to list your business name and address. No link is even required. This is awesome because it eliminates the whole “nofollow, no trust” issue.
If you want to rank well in the 7-box, I highly recommend people list their business address anywhere relevant on the web. Bing, Google+ (obviously), Yahoo Listings, BOTW… these are just some simple examples that got me to rank 2nd.
@Kyle, exactly. Google is pretty good at crawling and recognizing citations anywhere on the web. Even document sharing sites, etc. Lots of neat ways to sneak in citations (in a non-spammy way). It’s not always about the link. This even goes for regular SEO. It’s been proven that even a citation from wikipedia can influence rankings in a positive manner. Getting a citation from creditable websites is good too and sometimes easier. Another reason to do lots of Press Releases every year too. Can get some decent citations from media sites.