Did you know that, according to the World Economic Forum, there were about 1.88 billion websites in 2021? Additionally, since the first website was published in the year 1991, many big players have joined the online landscape, including Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and more.
Considering how many websites are online, it can be stressful, as a business owner, to find ways to put your website on this vast map.
Fortunately, with local citation building, you can make your local business stand out. In this article, we’ll review why your business should work with a local citation building service.
Finally, you can hire someone to do citation building for you. As a result, you’ll get more attention from local customers and your business will become more successful. Read on to learn more.
What Is a Local Citation?
Before we go into how local citations are good for your business and how a citation building service can make the process of building them easier, we’ll explain what a local citation is. This a citation that includes important information about your business, such as:
- The name of your business
- The address
- The phone number (or NAP)
There are different forms of these citations. Sometimes, they appear in national niche directories; other times, they appear in local business directories. One of the most common ways they appear is on Google Maps.
Why Are Local Citations Good for Your Business?
When you build your local citations, you’re building your business’s online credibility. This happens in a variety of ways. First of all, this is a signal to search engines that your business is trustworthy. As a result, these citations will have a positive impact on your SEO.
When your SEO is strong, your website is more likely to appear earlier when someone completes an online search.
Additionally, having local citations for your business is good for getting more local customers. Let’s say, for example, that you have a car repair service business.
If someone’s car breaks down in your area, they’ll likely want to go to a car repair service business near them.
If they do a local search on Google Maps or look in a local directory, and you have a citation where they look, then you’ll be on their radar.
As you can see, when you have many local citations, this can be great for your business. You’ll have an online presence that’s stronger both generally and locally.
Why You Should Work With a Local Citation Building Service
Even though it’s possible to build your local citations yourself, it can be helpful and more effective to work with a local citation builder. This is because they’ll be able to clean up the citations you already have, optimize your listings, and more.
They’ll Clean Up the Citations You Already Have
When you work with a citation builder, they’ll clean up the citations you already have. You could do this yourself, but it might take some time to find everywhere your local business information appears and verify that it’s accurate and consistent.
Instead, they can do this for you. This will save you both the time and effort required for doing this.
They’ll Optimize Your Listings
A citation builder will also optimize your listings. What does this mean? When it comes to how to build citations that are effective, you need to write a description that includes the right keywords (so you’re more likely to appear in a search).
But this isn’t all. You also have to select what industry you’re in and post up nice pictures. This can all take a lot of work.
A local citation building service will do this for you. In addition to making it possible for you to not have to do these tasks, they’ll optimize your listing in the best way possible.
By leaving this to a professional, you can ensure that your listings are as optimized as possible.
They’ll Handle Reviews
If you’ve ever done a local search before, you may have noticed that there are often star ratings for these businesses. In addition to making a business more trusted, this actually makes their local listings more powerful.
So if you want more customers to see you and for them to think that you run a business with high-quality services or products, good reviews help.
However, managing reviews can take a lot of work. This is especially the case if there are any negative reviews of you where these local citations appear.
You have to find these, reply to the negative reviewer gracefully, thanking them for their feedback and explaining your position. Sometimes, it helps to offer them a solution or to offer something in exchange for their trouble.
Constantly checking for negative reviews and addressing them takes a lot of time and work. Hire a professional to do this for you so you can focus on running your business.
They’ll Build New Citations for You
Finally, a local citation building service will build new citations for you. They’ll find the best places for your business information to appear both in industry and local directories. While you could do this yourself, it would take a large number of steps, including researching these directories.
You’d also have to keep track of the citations and you built them, another administrative step.
Have a local citation building service do this for you so you won’t have to get caught up in building a large number of new citations.
Looking For a Company to Do Local Citation Building for You?
Now that you’ve learned why your business should work with a local citation building service, you might be interested in hiring one. In this case, you should look no further than Bipper Media. We’re experts when it comes to local citation building.
We offer a large number of services, including content and syndication, backlinks, local citations, local SEO, citation cleanup, and websites.
To learn more about how we can help you with your local or small business, contact us now.