Have you ever called a business only to find out the number is no longer in service? Have you showed up at the address listed for a business, only to find that the business has changed locations?
The experience borders on infuriating, depending on your temperament. You’ve wasted your time, and in some cases, your money. You may decide that the business is no longer worth your energy, and opt to go to one of their competitors.
As a business owner, this is exactly the kind of situation you want to avoid at all costs. You need the vital information of your business, including your name, address, and phone number, to be accurate wherever your prospective customers find it.
The guide you’re reading right now was formulated to help with this very task. We’re going to teach you how to ensure that both search engines and prospective customers receive accurate information about your business name, address, and phone number – vital information that we’ll reference with the acronym NAP from here on out.
Additionally, this guide was specifically created for businesses in Halifax – there are some unique challenges to creating accurate NAP information in the area. We’ll address them.
What are citations?
Don’t worry, you’re not getting a parking ticket.
Citations are what we call references to your business NAP online. That’s probably about as clear as a bag of dirt, so let’s take a look at the two different types of citations:
Unstructured and structured citations
Any reference to your NAP online can be considered a citation – more specifically, they’re called NAP citations. That means people commenting about your phone number online, newspapers writing a review of your business – pretty much anything.
Let’s say you own a watercraft rental business, and a newspaper does a profile on your business. Their article might contain a phrase like:
“Located at 1234 Lower Water Street, Happy Halifax Harbour Rentals has been a staple of the community for over 20 years. They can be reached at (902)555-5555…”
As you can see, the business name, address, and phone number can all be found within the profile – but there’s no particular structure keeping them together.
A structured citation, on the other hand, looks like this:
Happy Halifax Harbour Rentals
1234 Lower Water Street
Halifax, N.S.
B0X 0X0
(902)555-5555
Unstructured citations are pretty much out of your control, but you can very easily build and correct structured citations. Those citations will be our focus – but why do we care in the first place?
Why citations are important
NAP citations are crucial to developing the online presence of your business. In our intro, we covered how incorrect citations can negatively affect customers.
They negatively affect search engines, too. Google and other search engines want to be sure that your business is real, and that you can be reached at the address and phone number they have listed. The more accurate NAP citations you have, the more sure search engines are that you really exist – and that can lead to a boost in your rankings.
On the flip side, the fewer accurate citations you have, and the more conflicting citations you have, the less sure a search engine will be that you:
- Are still in business
- Can be reached at the address and phone number given in a citation
Our goal, then, is to build accurate citations, and correct inaccurate citations.
Building citations in Halifax
We mentioned at the top that Halifax has some unique characteristics that make it more challenging to build and correct NAP citations for. What we have in mind is one specific characteristic – the amalgamation of the Halifax Regional Municipality in 1996.
There are still businesses that use Bedford or Dartmouth as their locations. We encourage you not to do this – use Halifax as your location in all NAP citations, even if you are located in the Bedford or Dartmouth regions of Halifax. With that in mind, let’s get into how to build citations.
Manual citation building (the slow method)
If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands and nothing better to do, manual citation building might be for you. We’re being pretty tongue-in-cheek, of course – you obviously have better things to do than to go on a hundred different business directories, make accounts on each, and create NAP citations for your business.
Nonetheless, it can be fun to build a few citations on your own, if for no other reason than to get a feel for what citation building is all about.
First, go to these top Canadian citation sites provided by Whitespark. Set up a business profile in each of these directories, ensuring that your information is consistent on each site – copy/paste is your friend, here.
After that, try to find citation opportunities in Halifax. The Halifax Chamber of Commerce is a good starting point!
Automated citation building (the fast method)
Manual citation building is obviously pretty time consuming – and time is money. That’s why you should leave the citation building to your SEO agency.
Don’t have an SEO agency working for you? Try an automated citation builder like BrightLocal’s local citation builder. It’s a paid service, but it’s almost certainly worth it if your alternative is building your own citations.
Fixing inaccurate citations
Most inaccurate citations are as a result of either disparities in location (like using Bedford instead of Halifax) or changes in your phone number. You can get inaccurate names in citations, too – for example, Happy Halifax Harbour Rentals Inc. instead of Happy Halifax Harbour Rentals.
Fortunately, we can find and fix inaccurate and incomplete citations.
Manually fixing citations (the slow method)
To find incomplete citations, Google the following terms:
- “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 inaccurate citations, Google the following terms:
- “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)
Once you’ve found the inaccurate citations, contact the site owner to have them corrected.
Automatically fixing citations (the fast method)
As you can imagine, finding and fixing existing citations manually is pretty time consuming – just imagine the struggle of emailing the site owner for every incorrect citation, or manually correcting them yourself on sites that allow you to modify your business profile.
Fortunately, your SEO agency can handle this work for you. Don’t have an SEO agency? Try BrightLocal’s citation tracker to take the work of finding incorrect and incomplete citations off your hands. You’ll still have to contact site owners yourself, though.
The best way, though, is to hire an SEO agency – we can build and correct citations for you, and do a whole lot more. We’re an experienced Halifax SEO agency – get in touch with us.
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