What are citations and why your Google Places page needs them?
Citations are mentions of your business name and address on various free or paid local listing services. The more citations your places page has the better are the chances of higher ranking of your listing. Through citations search engines trust your business listing because citations represent number of votes to your listing from other websites. It also helps search engine to signify your listings popularity, relevancy and importance and make your listing outstanding among other search results.
How to get citations for your listing?
First of all you have to research on the keywords that your listing is competing for. You have to determine top listings first then search the citations of your competitors and to do that type the business name and phone number as it appears on the places page within quotation marks in the search fields you will usually get the inflated number of search results but in order to get the actual number of citations you have to go to the very last page of the search results.
You can search for competitor’s citations via Google Maps cash software as well. But if you want to know the quality of citations specifically then I don’t recommend using the software because it can tell you number of citations and other details.
It is imperative to create citations first before setting up your Google places page. This eases the process of verification while claiming listing.
The types or quality of citations are categorized as under:
Instant Citations
Fast Track Citations
First Tier Citations
Second Tier Citations
Instant citations:
Citations with no verification are called instant citations. These are the local listing services that don’t require verification through phone or post card. The following are instant citations service providers.
calendar.goac.com
citycliq.com
citysquares.com
events.nydailynews.com
poidirectory.com
tupalo.com
bizwiki.com
brownbook.net
cylex-usa.com
facebook.com
getfreelisting.com
hotfrog.com
insiderpages.com
judysbook.com
manta.com
merchantcircle.com
mojopages.com
mylocalservices.us
sagespark.com
salespider.com
showmelocal.com
showsmart.com
tuugo.us
uscounties.com
where2go.com
yellowbot.com
yellowee.com
yelp.com
zvents.com
foursquare.com
Fast track citations:
These kind of citations are used for white hat hack technique listings. They are used not for just a single listing but for multiple listings in one or more than one city or area. Fast track citations are used for broad coverage and large number of web portals. The objective of using this service as the name implies, is to get citations fast and quick higher ranking.
First tier citations:
These citations are primary data providers in local search. These are used for white hat listings and are very important citations in terms of quality. Search engine trust them mostly. The following are first tier citations service providers.
Info USA
mybusinesslistingmanager.com
InsiderPages.com
Yahoo Local
Yellowpages.com Register Yellowpages.com Listing
AngiesList.com
CitySearch.com
Yelp.com
SuperPages.com
Second tier citations:
These citations are data sources for major local search portals. They share the same data from primary citation providers. But don’t under-estimate their importance they are considered for local search ranking too. The following are second tier citations service providers.
Bing.com
Brownbook.net
DiscoverOurTown.com
FourSquare.com
Gowalla.com
HotFrog.com
Kudzu.com
Manta.com
MerchantCircle.com
MojoPages.com User Sign up MojoPages.com Listing Setup
YellowBot.com Sign up YellowBot.com Listing Setup
Localeze.com
Navteq.com User Sign up Navteq.com Place Setup