If you’re the owner of a local Kitchener business, you already know that the city’s thriving financial and commercial sectors make it a perfect place to establish your vision and realize your goals. Downtown Kitchener’s revitalization continually draws new residents and tourists, while ION Rapid Transit allows for easy transportation and commuting throughout the Regional Municipality of Waterloo.
From the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy to THEMUSEUM and Rockway Gardens, Kitchener is a city with something to offer for people of all ages and interests. In fact, its population is growing steadily as more and more employment and recreation opportunities continue to develop.
While all of these factors make Kitchener an exciting business environment with lots of potential for growth, they also mean that local business owners must navigate the realities of a competitive landscape. You want your business to turn heads, stand out from the crowd, and garner an excellent reputation—which is where Local SEO comes into play.
Local SEO is the branch of search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on optimizing your website for a specific location and helping you show up in search results within a certain area. One important element of increasing your online presence as a local Kitchener business is to build citations.
Let’s take a look:
What Are Citations?
Local citations have nothing to do with referencing sources to avoid plagiarism. They’re also not directives issued by law enforcement officers.
In the world of Local SEO, citations refer to the listing of your business name, address, and phone number. They’re also sometimes referred to as NAP citations for this reason.
Why are NAP citations important? As with everything SEO related, they’re important because they help your business show up in organic search results. Citations help confirm to search engines that you’re a legitimate business with a real physical location—the kind of business Google users are looking to find. They’re one component of demonstrating to search engine algorithms that your business merits exposure.
In Kitchener, particularly, it’s important to ensure that your business citations are consistent across all sites and channels. If one citation lists your business as being located in Kitchener while another one refers to you as a Kitchener-Waterloo or K-W business, your rankings may suffer. These types of links are different from the general links you’ll build for your business.
Building Citations
Structured and Unstructured Citations
Unstructured citations don’t adhere to a specific format. They’re typically organic and show up in content that refers to your business. For example, if your business is featured in a local blog post as one of the top 10 up-and-coming Kitchener businesses in your niche, its name and location may be referred to within a paragraph in that blog. As a business owner, you have little control over unstructured citations.
Structured citations, on the other hand, are formatted with your business name, address, and phone number. They usually appear in places like contact pages, review sites, event sites, and online directories, as well as on your Google Business Profile (GBP). As a business owner, you typically have control over structured citations, which are generally formatted as follows:
Business Name
123 Citation St.
Kitchener, Ontario ABC123
(519) 123-4567
Manual Citation Building
The more NAP citations your business has, the more evidence search engines have that the information contained in those citations is accurate. Manual citation building involves seeking out citation opportunities for your business on websites like Yelp, Hotfrog, and more and creating business listings. Don’t neglect your Google Business Profile, along with any social media profiles you may maintain. In Canada, Yellow Pages is also one of the most important and influential places to list your business (it’s a major player in the Canadian local search ecosystem).
Here are some more suggestions for building manual Kitchener business citations.
Automated Citation Building
If building your own citations feels too time-consuming, you can opt to automate the process. Many automated citation builders exist, BrightLocal and Whitespark prominent among them. If you’re serious about automated citation building in the Kitchener Waterloo area, you’ll probably be most satisfied with a paid tool or service.
Fixing Inaccurate Citations
Once you’ve committed to continuously building citations to attract more organic traffic to your website, you’ll also need to audit those citations regularly to ensure they remain up-to-date and accurate. You can do this by using a tool through a platform like Moz or BrightLocal, but augmenting such tools with your own Google research is also recommended best practice.
For more information on how to manually conduct NAP citation research using Google, see our post dedicated to local citations.
By applying the information in this post, you’ll attract more local traffic and ultimately increase conversions for your business. Understanding local citations and ensuring that yours are current at all times is a straightforward local Kitchener SEO strategy that can have a substantial impact. On top of GBP optimizion, attention to good on-page SEO is a must. Learn about optimizing your meta descriptions here!
For more information about how organic search marketing and Local SEO can shine a spotlight on your Kitchener business, contact us directly at First Rank SEO.
Check us out on Best in Ottawa’s SEO list.
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.
