Citations For Burnaby Based Business

You’ve heard the phrase “citation needed”. In the world of SEO, the word citation has a pretty different meaning – but rest assured, citations are still very much needed.

What are citations? Why do they help you outrank competing Burnaby businesses on search engines? How can you maximize their effectiveness?

We answer all of these questions in this piece. This quick guide to citations in Burnaby is easy to follow: you’ll go from having a few weak citations to a lot of strong citations in no time flat, no prior experience required.

Let’s get down to it.

What are citations?

Citations are records of your business online. Here, we’ll be talking about name, address, and phone number (NAP) citations. 

These citations come in two formats: structured and unstructured. Structured citations are created specifically to tell people about your business. You’ll find structured citations on your Google My Business profile, your Facebook page, and your website. Here are a couple of ours for example:

Our GMB profile NAP citation.

Our website NAP citation.

Proper citations serve a dual purpose. First, they provide vital information to your clients: who you are, where you are, and how to get in touch with you. Second, they send signals to search engines that you are, in fact, a real business.

That’s why it’s essential that your name, address, and phone number remain consistent throughout all of your citations. The two examples we just gave you show that our citation could use a little work – our name is different in the two citations. Fortunately, we have enough matching citations that this discrepancy isn’t hurting our ranking very much at all.

In Burnaby, one of the most common citation mistakes is to put your location as Vancouver. Don’t do that! Even if you’re trying to rank in the whole of the Metro Vancouver area, keep your city as Burnaby in all of your citations.

A brief note on unstructured citations: they’re citations in blog posts, newspaper articles, or other places online that aren’t serving as directories. It can be quite useful to get unstructured citations: getting an unstructured NAP citation in, say, The Province can be a huge boon.

Checking citations

Now that you understand what citations are, you need to know how to check your existing citations. When citations don’t match, it creates mixed signals for search engines. Worse yet, it can cause your customers no end of confusion! Imagine this: a customer finds a citation with the wrong phone number, calls your business, and gets “This number is not in service”.

If I’m the customer who hears that message, I’m definitely going to look for another company to do business with.

To find NAP citations with missing information, you can use the following queries in Google:

• “Name” “Address” -“Phone number” (for citations without your phone number)

• “Name” “Phone number” -“Address” (for citations without your address)

• “Address” “Phone number” -“Name” (for citations without your business name)

To find NAP citations with incorrect information, you can use the the following queries in Google:

• “Address” “Phone number” “Former/incorrect name” (for citations with an old/incomplete business name)

• “Phone number” “Name” “Former/incorrect address” (for citations with an old/incomplete address)

• “Address” “Name” “Former/incorrect phone number” (for citations with an old phone number)

You can also use this citation tool, created by Moz.

When you spot incorrect or incomplete citations, simply correct them! If you can’t correct them from your own account, contact support staff for the website hosting the incorrect/incomplete citation.

Creating citations

There are two ways you can create citations for your Burnaby business: manually, or through paid citation tools. BrightLocal and WhiteSpark both offer paid citation services. When you get SEO through First Rank, we’ll build citations for you as part of your SEO package.

The manual route is quite a bit more time-consuming – you’ll have to make accounts on a variety of different websites, and then put your business information into each of those websites. You want dozens (if not hundreds) of citations, so doing this will take awhile.

You’ll start by targeting the sites that are most relevant to citations. Create a GMB Profile if you haven’t – it’s arguably the most important source of citations. You’ll also want to build citations on Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing, YellowPages, Bell, and other major citation providers. You can find a list of some of Canada’s top citation sources on BrightLocal’s Canada Local Citations page. 

You need NAP citations in Burnaby

There’s a lot of competition in Burnaby, and having a large number of accurate NAP citations is an easy way to stay ahead of the curve. If you’d like to automate citation building, and everything else related to your SEO, get in touch with us. While technically it won’t be automated, we have hard-working staff members who will do the work for you, so it will feel automated from your point of view.

We make Burnaby SEO easy, so you can focus on running your business!