7 Reasons Citation Management Is Important for Small Businesses

Citation management is an important part of the local SEO services we offer to small businesses. There are several reasons every small business needs to pay attention to this.

7 benefits of good citation management

Broad Exposure

Online business listings

How widely are you known across the Internet?

You need to make sure you’re listed and easy to find across the web at dozens of local search engines, directories, maps, mobile apps, and voice assistants like Alexa. This also helps Google, Yahoo & Bing to have more trust in who you are, what you do, and where you are.

Accuracy and Consistency

It can make sure your NAP (name address, phone) is consistent across all of those listings. Before working with us, a recent client was missing from more than a third of the top citation listings. Even worse, two listings had an incorrect address and 14 had their old company name. When this happens, Google has very low confidence in who or where you are. And that’s devastating to your chances of showing up in local searches.

Visible Reviews

Make it easy for delighted customers to review you.
Having reviews on multiple sites builds your reputation.

Having review stars show up in multiple places enhances your reputation. When you get a word-of-mouth referral, odds are that person will look you up by name before they call, just to check you out. When they do, your website should show up — but so will many of your citations, at places like Google My Business, Yelp, MerchantCircle, Facebook, and more. Some may show up that you’ve never heard of, like Clutch or TrustPilot. If all of those have review stars displaying in the search results, that increases the likelihood that person will want to do business with you.

Review Monitoring

We send our clients an email every time someone posts a new review for them. Responding to reviews promptly has been found to increase conversions and closed business. So it’s important to know about new reviews as they happen.

Suppressing duplicate listings helps search engines trust which is correct.

Duplicate Listing Monitoring

Duplicate and near-duplicate listings can confuse search engines, and that’s never a good thing. We alert our clients whenever we find a possible duplicate so they can check it out and suppress it if necessary.

Robust Business Information

Good citation management doesn’t just start with getting your NAP widely disseminated. All of those citation sources gather and reflect lots of information about your business:

Website and email links
Description of your business and services
Social media links
Business hours including special holiday hours
Accessibility information
Your logo and photos
much more

Inclusion in verticals

Google is getting better and better at responding to what’s called vertical search. Proper citation management will promulgate information that can help you show up when people search for specific things like