You want vital information about your business to be consistent throughout the Web. Imagine this: a client finds your business online on a site like Yelp. They look at your reviews, decide you’re a good fit for whatever they need, and call you up.
The problem? The number on your Yelp page is out of service. The prospective client decides you don’t seem very professional, and they take their business elsewhere.
What you’ve just experienced is lost business because of a bad citation. Unfortunately, bad citations can be found all over the Internet, and they can cause serious problems for Mississauga businesses.
In this piece, we’ll teach you exactly what citations are, how you can fix broken citations, and how you can create more citations around the Web.
What are citations?
“Citation” can mean a lot of different things, as any university freshman soon learns. In our case, we’re talking about citations that include your business name, address, and phone number – NAP citations for short.
NAP citations come in two forms: structured and unstructured. Structured citations are found in directories like Google My Business (GMB), Yelp, and Facebook. Unstructured citations are found in places like online newspaper articles or blog posts. Imagine you have a restaurant featured in The Mississauga News – a reference in that article to your NAP information is an unstructured citation.
You want to get as many legitimate citations as possible, structured or unstructured – getting featured in The Mississauga News or the Star would be a huge boon.
Citations, you see, serve a dual purpose. First, they give prospective customers the most important information about your business – they’ll know exactly how to get in contact with you after finding you online.
The other thing citations do is send signals to search engines that your business is legitimate. When hundreds of websites are making reference to your business using the same NAP information, it tells search engines that you do, in fact, exist, and that you operate from a physical location with an active phone number.
Fixing citations
That tells you why accurate citations are so important – when your NAP citations have bad information, it sends mixed signals to both your clients and search engines. Fortunately, bad citations are easy enough to fix.
A common citation error for many Mississauga businesses is found in the address – some businesses erroneously use Toronto as their city. That can cost you points with search engine algorithms, especially if some of your citations say Toronto while others say Mississauga.
Keep it consistent – use Mississauga as your address, even if you’re trying to attract business from the GTA.
Finding bad citations
To fix bad citations, you need to find them. To do so, you can use some carefully crafted search queries.
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.
Once you’ve found citations with missing or incomplete information, simply create or sign into your business account on the website in question and change the citation. If you can’t make an account, get in touch with their service team. If the citations are unstructured, get in touch with the website owner/editor.
Building citations for your Mississauga business
Our next step is to build citations. The more citations you have, the more likely customers are to find you online – and the more positive signals you’re sending to search engines.
There are two ways to build citations: manually, and automatically.
Manual citation building
Manually building citations is tedious work, but if you want to save money and you have a few hours on your schedule with nothing to do, it’s relatively simple. You’ll probably be able to build a hundred citations over the course of 10 Rush songs – if you pick the long ones.
Building citations manually is as simple as creating business accounts on relevant websites and filling in your NAP information. The citation ecosystem in Mississauga is very different from the ecosystem in the USA, but don’t worry – we’ve got resources for you.
First, focus on building citations on these pages:
From there, take a look at this list of Canadian citation sites provided by BrightLocal.
Automatic citation building
BrightLocal also provides an automatic citation building tool. You can also find citation opportunities automatically with WhiteSpark’s citation finder. These services cost money, of course, but for many business owners the time that would have to be spent building citations is much more costly than the fees WhiteSpark and BrightLocal charge.
Full service citation building and fixing in Mississauga
Of course, if you don’t have the time to deal with citation building, you can always call us here at First Rank. When you get our SEO Mississauga services, we’ll include citation building and fixing as part of the package. You’ll also get the rest of our full suite of SEO services, including content creation, link building, and much more.
Jacob Kettner is the owner and CEO of First Rank Inc., a digital marketing agency based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He currently sits on Manitoba Chamber of Commerce Small Business Advisor Council which assists people grow their small businesses in Manitoba.
