• Location/address
• Finding particular services and products
• Looking for contact info
• Finding businesses’ operational hours
• Driving directions
• Promo codes/coupons
• Reading consumer reviews

If any of the above apply to your business, you should focus on local SEO—and ensure that your business has enough citations online. Here, we’ll discuss the creation, checking and optimization of local citations as they pertain to local SEO.

As a business with a brick-and-mortar location, using a set of best practices is just as important as using a broader approach to SEO. Citations are mentions of your business on external web pages, and they include your address and phone number, whether or not a website link is included. A commonly used term with local citations is “NAP” – name, address and phone number; however, other factors such as videos, photos and categorization also play a role. Below are four factors that are critical in the creation of an effective business listing.

• Name: Your business title or name is one of the most important factors in local SEO rankings. We will make sure your title is consistent web-wide; doing so will establish you and your location as a trusted source for your product and/or service.

• Address: With NAP, consistency is key. Search engines are focused on detail, and if your address isn’t consistent across the web, the engines will consider each listing as a different business and your rankings will suffer.

• Phone number: Consistency is also very important when you’re putting your business phone number online. If the search engines find different phone numbers for your business, their algorithms will penalize you and your rankings will fall. We’ll make sure your phone number is the same, no matter where on the web it’s located.

• Category: According to a recent survey, proper categorization is an important relevance signal. When we create a listing for your business in local search engines, we’ll pick a few categories that describe it – and we’ll use those categories to find the appropriate keywords.

Now that we’ve discussed why citations are important in local SEO, we’ll tell you where we’ll list your business for the maximum effect. We’ll cite your business in local search engines such as:

• Bing Places
• Google Places
• Yelp
• Yahoo! Local
• Foursquare

We’ll also list your NAP on your social media accounts (which we can help you with as well) and on the top blogs in South Africa.

When it comes to local SEO strategy implementation and local business citation building, you have three options to choose from: doing it all yourself, paying for expensive software or hiring us at SEO Traffic. You’ll need to consider your budget when making a hiring decision, but we have plans tailored to businesses of all sizes and budgets. Below we’ll discuss each of your three options:

• Doing it yourself – There are many places online that tell you how to do your own business citations, but all take essentially the same approach – check, fix and add. You’ll need to check to see if your business is indeed listed, and if it is, you’ll need to verify the accuracy of your NAP (and fix it if necessary). If your business isn’t listed, you’ll have to add it.

• Subscription software – There are a few options to help you manage business citations, each with its pros and cons.

• Hiring the pros at SEO Traffic – Depending on the level of effort you’ve already put into your local SEO campaign, and upon your budget, SEO Traffic’s professional citation building service may be a viable option. If you don’t have the time or knowledge to put together your own citations, or if you don’t want to go the software route, we can help.

When you hire SEO Traffic to do your local submission service and improve your local SEO, we’ll manually list your URL with local directories in accordance with their terms and conditions. We’ll submit your URL to multiple high page rank directories, and we’ll include your corporate logo, pictures, videos and social media account page names. Before we do any local business directory submission, we’ll check for current listings to avoid duplication penalties. After we’re done, we’ll provide you with a verifiable report including live links and login information. Our directory listings will give you greater web traffic, more quality back links, and a boost to your SERP rankings and page rank. Currently, we support businesses in South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.

SEO Traffic’s citation database has over one thousand top-quality, high authority citation sites. These sites are a potent mix of local and general directories, event sites and niche-specific directories where we can list your business NAP. Our reliable citation building service takes care of submissions for you, submitting directly to every site and getting your business listed right away. With each package, we’ll create unique accounts for each campaign and give you login credentials when we’re done.

Building citations for a local business is a great way to increase organic rankings in search engines, regardless of your industry. Whether web users are researching your business at home or on the go, you can’t afford to disregard the potential of local SEO and proper business citations. By hiring the team at SEO Traffic, you can ensure the consistency of your NAP across online platforms, and you can build trust and credibility while you increase your brand awareness.