Approximate Transcription of the above video:
Hello, this video is about local SEO citations. What I will talk about in this video is some big picture ideas all the way down to some specific techniques. There's some massive misunderstandings about citations. What are the best citations to get for ranking in Google ranking Google Maps? And how do you maximize citations for local SEO purposes? Who am I? And what are my experiences with this? My name is David Hood. And I've been doing SEO for well over seven years full time, and a lot of my SEO is local SEO, and I've gotten a lot of maps rankings a lot. And this has become even more important over time. That's one of the big picture points here is that ranking your website, ranking your business in Google Maps or ranking our clients business and Google Maps has become way more important over time. Now citations play a part in that they used to play a bigger part, at least that the the exact way in which you went about them was was much more important. Nowadays, there, they still play a pretty significant part. But it's different. And it's not quite as important. There's a lot more pieces to ranking in the maps. But it's so important that you get these right, and that you also don't waste resources based upon maps, SEO techniques that worked like five years ago, but nowadays don't really matter a whole lot. And I've gotten a lot of rankings. So this stuff I'm gonna talk about actually does work. So first of all, how do you do sort of like a check up on your citations, the simplest way is to use either white spark dot c or bright local, they're very similar. I think I prefer white spark a little bit. But there, it's inexpensive, you can get I think both of them have like 20 or $30 a month plans that you can go on, which will scan the internet for citations of your website, it will also give additional suggestions for citations. It's especially useful to see citations that your competitors have. Now you don't want just big broad citations. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this later in the video. But you don't need a lot of like super broad citations. This is one of the big misunderstandings. It used to be the you know, if I had 100 citations and and the other guy had 200, he would outrank me, that's not true anymore. It's not about more citations. You do want some of the big ones technically the Google My Business pages besides citation, I mean, like Yext, and Bing, and stuff like that those are going to be useful. But those aren't the important, the most important citations to get Nope. And it's not just about more citations. It's also about the way in which you set up the citations, for example, and this is common, you want a decently consistent name, address and phone number. That's what Knapp stands for. So you got this, this name right here, and this address and his phone number. So you wouldn't want half your citations to have, like a wrong phone number, that's gonna be really bad. At the same time, it doesn't have to be perfect across everything I've heard a lot of people talk about, you have to have a perfect one bad citation, it's just gonna crush your rankings. And I haven't found that to be true. In fact, I think Google gets this. First of all, there's a lot of websites out there that you'll get some natural citations, just by having a Google My Business Page, there's a lot of websites out there that will scrape this information, and they might even scrape it incorrectly. Or, you know, you moved or change phone numbers or the business your your customer did. And there's no way to change these citations. Some of them, they're just super poorly managed, and there's not really anybody you can contact that will change it. There's no way to access it. Some of them I've had when they actually responded, they'll be like, yeah, we don't let people edit them. But you can add a new one. It's like, Well, that doesn't help me. I mean, it guess it does, and it kind of doesn't. And so you know, I think as long as you have the vast majority of these correct, you're fine. I have an example with a lawyer who has a few of these that are just bad, like he changed his phone number and his address. And some of them have the wrong address. And some of them have the wrong phone number, but there's just a few and we changed all the ones that we could. And he ranks really well on the maps. Okay, so this does I think Google understands this. Check out How Setup your Google My Business Page. And also there's sort of this idea that, you know, sweet, and pound and STP and spelling out sweet number.
I mean, it's better for that to be consistent. But I think that Google gets that those are the same things. Okay. And if a few of yours have slightly different versions of that, I think as long as that number is correct, is accurate, then you're fine. Again, this is Google's algorithms getting smarter. And it's while it isn't as smart as people think. It's not super dominant can it can easily be programmed to be like, okay, STP period is the same thing as sweet, which is the same thing as lb. All right. So they're not going to punish you for that. There's other things that you can do. Here's another thing that a lot of people don't do, which is actually very useful for you. And there's a lot of different ways in which you can use this. So what you want to do, and this is within Windows, I'm not sure how to do this on Mac. So figure, you know, figure this out, Mack, my Dallas SEO geek website ranks really, really well on the maps. And one of the things that I did was I edited the properties of the images that I put not just in my Google My Business Page. And not just in my citations, but all over the internet. When other businesses link to me, sometimes I can get them to use my geotagged images, okay, which is fantastic. But you can right click and do properties you can edit like the title, the subject, I gave it five stars, because obviously, it's an amazing image. You know, I put in like local SEO Google Maps, I put in my name, address phone number I put in, you can put in a couple different URLs. And you'll know and there's all sorts of different tools out there that allow you to geotag. And what that's doing is that's marking a longitude and latitude location for where the picture where the image was created. And if you take a picture with your phone, this will already be there. But if you take a picture, with your phone in one place, and you want it to actually be do tech for another place, you'll have to clear this data out. So you can see again, in Windows is removed properties and personal, this will kind of refresh it and started from scratch, but you'll know. So if you see this scroll, you'll scroll down, you'll know you've geotagged it by you'll have a lot of latitude and longitude under the GPS, okay. And that's going to be helpful. It's not going to a lot of the stuff that you do with these citations isn't going to by itself, suddenly make you go from not ranking at all to ranking really well, there's a lot more that you can do with maps, SEO beyond the citations, but it's going to help. And when you do it all, when you do all the pieces of the puzzle, right? It dramatically improves your ability to rank and especially improves, I think the more kind of signals you have for your location being in a specific place, the more that someone near that location actually shows up in the search, where you will actually show up in their search results. Okay, so what are the best citations? This is, this is what a lot of people get wrong, this is the biggest misunderstanding, they're like, Okay, I need more citations. No, it's better to have it'd be better to have 20. Or let's say 10, niche specific citations and 10 location specific citations and 10 kind of broad big sub major citations than it is to have 100 broads or even 200, broad citations. Okay? The the even even if these have lower domain authority, so for example, lawyers, there's a lot of lawyer directory sites that have a lot of properties that it's all about lawyers, this is better than getting a random high authority, just general citation in general, that that's the case. And then also location specific. So getting, there's Dallas based directories, this is going to be useful, this is going to be give a lot of authority. Not only that, but these these citations actually can help you rank organically. So these being getting niche relevant relevance matters from a link building standpoint, and not really in the ways that people think, but it really matters. So having lawyer or Dallas in that in the in the domain name, the titles, the URLs of pages, the age tags, all of that, if that you get a lot of that with your citation. And that's great. That's gonna help you rank and it's in the maps and the non maps organic.
And here is one of the best ways that this can help you use these as tier two link targets. Now, I wouldn't spam the crap out of them. But sending a few reasonable quality links to your citations, especially do follow citations, even nofollow citations is going to be beneficial to your maps rankings and to your regular organic rankings, especially when you have a citation that's on. So you have you have a domain that has good authority, and then it creates a new page with that, that is on a high domain authority site, but there's no links going to that specific page, just sending one or two links to that page is going to really power to a lot. And, and this is going to be extreme. Again, it's gonna be extremely useful for both the maps and the regular organic which are connected to a certain degree. And it's also going to filter any link juice. So it's a it's a tier two link. So you can be a little riskier with this. Again, I wouldn't spam and I wouldn't load up GSA or any spam tools and, and just spam the crap out of it. Because I think that that ultimately is not going to help you and it's very difficult to get to work. But just a few decent quality, reasonable quality links with some power in them is going to go a long way to improving your rankings. And this is one of the best ways the most untapped resources for people's link building and for their ability to rank in maps. So I appreciate you watching. Let me know what you think if you have any other tips on citations or sources or better software than brightlocal, please put a comment below. If you have any other resources on how to do this with a Mac, I would I would be very interested to hear if it was like that I don't have a Mac so I don't know. Or if you have any other like location or niche specific type of citation information that you can give out I think everyone would be really excited to hear that and think You're watching Like this video if you like it and subscribe for more. Have a great day.
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Below is an AI generated article about Local SEO Citations:
What are Local SEO Citations?
Local SEO citations involve online local business listings which mention the business name, street address, and mobile number. Also known as local listings, local citations help users to find local businesses via local search engines. They can also be helpful in attracting new customers. For online business owners, local citations can help them to get better rankings in major search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.
Google and other search engines give special importance to organic local citations when they come to page results. These citations play a key role in boosting online visibility of websites. They can also help to improve online visibility of local businesses when they appear in online directories. Organic search results are more favored by web users compared to paid placements. Hence, online businesses should focus on building local SEO rankings to ensure better online profits.
How do Local Citations Affect SEO?
When online business owners engage in SEO activities, they must take into consideration two important factors: high quality links and accurate local seo citations. Both these factors are vital for improving business rankings. Link building is one way of improving business rankings with the help of local seo citations. Citations from business directories can improve your business rankings as online users prefer websites that contain valuable information, which are properly cited.
Another factor which improves rankings is accurate local seo citations. Keyword-rich content is beneficial in increasing traffic and improving search engine rankings. Content writers are paid on a specific fee basis for generating keyword-rich content. Hence, online businesses should hire professional content writers to generate relevant keyword-rich content for their website to enjoy good rankings.
However, it is also essential to have accurate local seo citations. Citations from local business directories play an important role in this regard. A good website ranking involves consistent use of local business data. Hence, it is essential to submit accurate data. If you submit inaccurate data, your website could face the risk of being blacklisted. Blacklisting occurs when your website is not included in search results pages.
Local SEO Citation Methods
The most popular method used by online businesses to gain local seo rankings is to submit local citations. However, to submit local citations successfully, you need to follow specific guidelines provided by search engines. Google pays a lot of attention to local search rankings. As a result, most experienced online marketers employ local seo citations to improve business rankings on major search engines. There are many online marketing companies offering affordable local seo training. You could hire a local SEO expert or a local SEO firm to submit local citations for your business.
The guidelines provided by Google include using only one to seven data points when submitting local SEO citations. However, if you cannot obtain the contact information of the local business owner through the Google local site, you can obtain contact information by using the contact page. Google provides all the information required to find the contact details of the local business owner. Therefore, you should make sure that you have the contact details of the local business owner before you submit your website url via local seo citations. If the business phone number is not provided, you could use the business phone number found in the website domain name of the online store.
Once you get the contact details of the local business owner, you can ask him/her for his business address. After getting the business address, you can enter the business address into the Google Places map with the corresponding labels. You can create a local seo citation by entering the business name, address, phone number, and website url. Google local gives you the option of either submitting the URL or description of the business to the local seo citation form. You can request for the submission or description of business online citations.
My primary revenue sources are Client SEO, SEO Lead Generation, and selling Information Products.
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