Local SEO and citation building go hand-in-hand. Want to get more local clients to come to your website and your physical location? You’re going to need to build citations.
What Are Citations?
Fortunately, we’re not asking you to cite all of your sources – your business isn’t a university paper, after all. Rather, in the context of local SEO, citations consist of your business name, address, and phone number – for that reason, they’re often referred to as NAP citations.
Citations are essential to local SEO because search engines use them to confirm that you’re a real business with a real physical location. In Vancouver, developing your local citations is particularly important. The Metro area is vast, and it contains a lot of different cities. Search engines want to direct customers to areas close to them, so if you have citations that list your city as Vancouver while others list your city as North Vancouver, you’re going to see SEO penalties.
Building Citations
Structured and Unstructured Citations
There are two distinct types of citations: unstructured citations, and structured citations.
Imagine you own an up-and-coming restaurant in Gastown. The Georgia Straight might publish an article online about your new location, and that article might include your address in a sentence like “located at 263 Columbia Street, the SEO Café…”. This is an unstructured citation – it’s not set up in a “structured” NAP format (which we’ll look at next).
Conversely, a structured citation might look something like this:
The SEO Café
263 Columbia Street
Vancouver, BC, V6A 1K3
(604)555-5555
You have less control over unstructured citations – they tend to pop up in articles online, Facebook posts, forum comments, and other such places. Structured citations, conversely, are much more easily controlled – they’re usually used by business directories.
Manual Citation Building
There are a couple of ways you can build citations – the more you have, the more proof search engines have that your NAP information is accurate. The first (and most time consuming) way is to manually build citations yourself. This means going to websites like Yelp and Hotfrog and creating a listing for your business. You should also keep your Google My Business and Facebook Business (among others) information up to date.
You’ll see a lot of information online about various data aggregators and business directories – almost all of it is dedicated to American consumers. A consequence of this is that many Canadian businesses aren’t aware of the most important Canadian directory – Yellow Pages. Yes, the same business that made those antiquated phone books is one of the most important businesses for Canadian, local SEO.
Check out this Canadian business directory guide by WhiteSpark to find more places to build citations.
Automated Citation Building
Don’t feel like finding directories and building citations yourself? You could try BrightLocal’s Citation Builder – you’re charged per citation, so it’s the more expensive option, but it’s far less time consuming than searching and submitting to directories yourself.
Fixing Inaccurate Citations
Now that you’ve built citations, it’s time to find and correct citations that are inaccurate. As we’ve mentioned, this is particularly important in Vancouver because of the glut of different municipalities in one area.
Citations will either be incomplete (missing name, address, or phone number), or incorrect (provide inaccurate information). You should note that everything needs to be exactly consistent. For example, if our restaurant was actually named The SEO Café and Grill but was sometimes listed as The SEO Café or even The SEO Cafe and Grill, the citation would be inaccurate.
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)
Replace the name, address, and phone number with your correct business’s name, address, and phone number.
To find incorrect 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)
This is the manual route. For a more automated, paid route, you can use BrightLocal’s Citation Tracker (which doubles as a way to find new citation building opportunities).
Follow these steps, and you’ll significantly improve your Vancouver Local SEO. Great SEO is one of the best ways to get many qualified, local leads knocking on your door, and citations are an easy win. Go for it! Check out our resource on what is a local citation for more information.
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