Citations are the true backbone of your local search and Google Places listing.

Don’t expect your website or Places listing to rank very well without them!

What are citations?

A citation is information from your website and/or your business that is listed on other internet content holders like directories and other websites.

An example would be your listings on Yelp, Manta or Merchant Circle, (there are hundreds of sites like these to list your business).

Google’s bots and spiders continually search the web for content and information. When they visit sites like Manta and hundreds like them, they will find your business information like name, address, phone number and website URL.

The information found is compared to other information from other sites and if the business name, address, phone number and website address are all EXACTLY the same, then this is a citation for you.

In other words, Google has verified that your business is legit on Manta and then anywhere else it’s found.

Google wants their customer, the searcher, to have the best possible search experience and this includes accurate, relevant and fast results.

If they find any variations in your company’s information, it will be deemed inaccurate/unreliable and your website and/or Google Places listing will not be shown to the searcher, or if it is, it will be listed so low, no one will find it.

Every aspect of your citation must be the same across the board. For example, your company name must be listed exactly the same everywhere. It’s easy when submitting company information to start abbreviating and shorting words.

This is a huge mistake and your citation will be severely devaluated.

Another mistake is using different phone numbers. It’s strongly suggested that 800 numbers not be used on citation listings. Google may think this is a re-direct number that takes their searcher somewhere else they don’t want to go.

If you want a high value citation, use your local phone number. Chances are, the searcher will go to your website anyway. But the point is, if your phone numbers don’t match up across all content holders, you won’t be ranked very high if you’re ranked at all.

There is debate right now about using LLC, LTD and other company designations. There isn’t a clear answer on this so I strongly suggest erring on the side of caution and NOT use them in your citations.

If you have a lot of citations floating around that use those designations, I wouldn’t worry too much unless you want to go around and change them all.

If you are thinking about getting a new phone number, you MUST search that number and see if any other companies that used that number before, still have citations.

Search the potential new number on Google and see what comes up in the listings. Don’t worry about listings that are from different area codes.

If you find a company listed in the first 50 listings or so, this can affect your ranking because Google is seeing the same thing you are. To overcome this, you have to have enough citations with your new phone number to push the incorrect listings out of the way.

This is tedious work and if you don’t want to do it, I suggest you find a cleaner number. For example, on the first 5 pages of search results, if you find another company listed for you new phone number 2 times on each page, I’m going to suggest you have 15-30 new citations to overcome that.

Another way is to report the error to the content holder. They generally will cooperate and change the number or delete the listing that’s hurting you but it can take awhile.

In summary, company name, address, phone number and URL must be exactly the same on websites, local business directories and anywhere else Google looks. If it’s not, your ranking will suffer.