Local SEO citations: which ones matter, and how to fix the wrong ones

A citation is any listing of your business name, address and phone number on somebody else's website. Directories, maps, review sites, the local chamber, an industry association, a supplier's stockist page. Each one is a small claim about where you are and how to reach you, and Google reads them alongside your own site and your Business Profile when it decides how confident it is about your business.

Businesses do not create wrong listings on purpose. Sometimes it is a move: the office changed and nobody went back to the directories. Many times it is as simple as two spellings of the name, one with the "Ltd" and one without, or a phone number with and without the area code. The trouble is that the wrong listings do not go away on their own, and they cost you in two ways.

Why the wrong ones cost you calls

The first cost is direct. A customer finds the old number on a directory you forgot existed, rings it, gets nothing, and rings the next business on the list. You never know it happened.

The second is indirect. Google is trying to work out whether the business at this address with this number is real and current, and a set of listings that disagree with each other is a reason to be less sure. Less sure means shown less often in the map results, and the map results are where the phone calls come from. Nobody outside Google knows exactly how much weight it puts on this, and it is less than it once was. In our experience it still decides the close cases, which for most local businesses is all of them.

The ones that matter

There is a short list and a long tail. The short list is worth getting exactly right; the long tail is worth fixing when it is wrong and never worth paying to extend.

• Your Google Business Profile, which is the listing every other listing is compared against.
• Apple Maps and Bing Places, because a share of your customers use them without thinking of it as a choice.
• The data aggregators for your country, the wholesalers that feed hundreds of small directories from one record. Fix the record once and the copies follow, slowly.
• The two or three directories your industry actually uses: the legal directories for a law firm, the trade body for a plumber, the booking sites for a dentist.
• The big general directory in your country, the one that still ranks for "plumber near me" in your town.

Everything beyond that is a listing that a handful of people will see a year. It should be correct because a handful of people will see it. It should not be paid for, and it should never be built by the hundred.

How many you need

Fewer than the people selling them will tell you. Once the short list above is accurate and the aggregators have caught up, adding more citations does very little that anyone has been able to measure, and a stack of listings on low-quality directories can look like exactly what it is. Do not get hung up on the count. You are looking for one set of true facts, repeated wherever a customer might look, and for no false ones anywhere.

Fixing the wrong ones, in order

Decide the one true version first: the exact name, the exact address including the unit number, the one phone number, the one website address. Write it down, because the job fails when three people fix listings with three slightly different versions.

Then fix the Business Profile, because everything is compared to it. Then the aggregators, because they feed the rest. Then the industry directories and the big general one. Then, with a search for the old number and the old address in quotes, the stragglers: claim the ones you can, request corrections on the ones you cannot, and mark listings for a business that used to be at your address as moved or closed.

Do not be surprised if a few revert to the old data a month later. Some directories refresh from a feed that still carries the old record, so the fix is at the feed. It can be a slog at times, and it does end, because a listing corrected at the source stays corrected.

The ones to leave alone

Paid listings on directories that send you no visits are not worth renewing, and they are not worth paying to remove either. Leave them, keep them accurate if it is free to, and spend the time on the reviews and the profile instead, which move the map results far more than the fortieth directory does.

What good looks like after three months

Fewer wrong-number calls, which you will notice before any report does. More calls and direction requests from the Business Profile, in its own insights. And when somebody searches your business name, one set of facts everywhere they look. That last one is the point of the whole exercise, and it is worth checking every quarter, because a listing somewhere is always drifting.

Where this fits

Citations are one section of the local SEO checklist, and the profile they all point at has its own guide to Google Business Profile optimisation. If you want the whole of it done for you, with calls as the measure, that is the local SEO service. And the markup that tells Google the same facts from your own site can be generated in a minute with the LocalBusiness schema tool.