Local citations are mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) online. They were voted the fifth most important ranking factor for local queries in Moz’s 2018 study.
They’re likely a bit less important these days, but they’re still worth getting for two reasons:
They help people find your business – Local SEO is not just about optimizing for Google, but also other search engines people may use to find your business, such as Yelp, Bing, Facebook, Apple Maps, and any industry-specific directories.
They may still help you to rank – Even though they’re less important than they once were, they may still help you to rank.
If you’re in the U.S., the best place to start with local citations is the three main U.S. aggregators:
Data Axle
Localeze
Foursquare
These services feed their data to many other websites and directories, so getting citations on these services can often lead to citations elsewhere without any extra work.
You may also want to pursue these other major players:
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
Bing
Apple Maps
Yelp
Yellowpages
Dunn & Bradstreet
TomTom
Beyond this, it’s mostly worth concentrating on industry or location-specific citations. In other words, listings on local or industry-specific directories and search engines. As most of these citations include a link to the business’s website alongside its NAP information, the easiest way to find relevant opportunities is to look for common links to other similar local businesses.
Here’s how to use our Link Intersect tool to do this:
Enter your domain into Site Explorer
Click Link intersect on the left menu
Enter a few competitors
Click Show link opportunities
For example, if we do this for a plumbing company and a few of its competitors, we see many results that are clearly local or industry-specific directories:
Link Intersect tool in Ahrefs
Getting citations from these sites is usually as simple as signing up and adding your details.