If you’re running a small business, especially a small business with a local focus like dentistry, self storage, legal, or accounting services, and have looked into running a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, chances are you’ve run into the term “citations” or “web citations.” Nobody wants to look like a fool, and upon hearing the term you may have thought, “Citations? What the heck are those? Well, better just nod my head and act like I know what this web geek guy is talking about.” To make you feel better, allow me to confess that I run an online marketing firm, and I thought the same thing the first time I heard about citations from one of my employees.
What Is A Citation?
It’s not Google’s version of a speeding ticket. The kind of
citation I’m talking about is a good thing. Loosely defined, any time
someone mentions your company on their website, that’s a citation. You
might also call it a reference, shout out, or mention, but in SEO-speak
it’s a citation. Is it a citation even if there isn’t a link to your
business? Yes. What if it’s just the name and nothing else? Well, yes,
you could still call it a citation, although a citation is more
effective if it’s not just the name of your company with a logo link,
but the company name accompanied by a phone number, address, or other
identifying information that tells search engines exactly who you are.
For example, my firm is named “MWI,” which is a rather generic name that
is shared by perhaps hundreds of other companies around the world (we
even ran into a few in Asia when we decided to open a branch office in
Hong Kong). Unless the name of my firm is accompanied by a link, phone
number, address, or other identifying information it’s difficult for
Google or any other search engines to know if that citation belongs to
my firm or one of the other MWIs in the world.
Some examples of citations might include a listing on an
online phone directory or the member page of a chamber of commerce or
other industry association. If your business sponsors a charity and they
list you as a sponsor on their website, or you make a presentation at a
local college and they list you and your company to promote the event,
those are also citations.
As Nyagoslav Zhekov says on a Whitespark blog post, even
a phone number by itself could potentially be a citation that search
engines would pick up on, inasmuch as it can be matched to a particular
company.
Why Are Citations Good?
Citations are good for business regardless of any effect
they have on your online marketing. Anytime someone mentions your
business on their website they’re bringing attention to you and
providing you with exposure to potential customer or clients. But when
it comes to SEO there is an added dimension in that Google and other
search engines pay attention to citations, and the more citations you
have, all other things being equal, the better your website will rank on
those search engines for searches related to what you do and where you
are geographically located, which will bring you more web traffic, and
more web traffic means more customers.
Citations are especially important for businesses that
operate within a limited geographic range, like a certain city, because
it is in part by citations that Google can determine that a certain
business is active within a certain city and not the one next door.
Through the effective use of citations and other SEO tactics a small
company can outflank a large company on the search engines because it
can prove itself to be more relevant to local search results than a
national firm that must focus on a very broad market.
In fact, some small businesses that don’t even have
websites can benefit from a little SEO know-how when it comes to
citations. As pointed out at getlisted.org,
“Citations are particularly important in less-competitive niches (like
plumbing or electrical) where many service providers don’t have websites
themselves. Without much other information, the search engines rely
heavily on whatever information they can find!”
How Do I Get Citations?
Benjamin Beck of LocalStampede, a Utah-based online marketing firm, has created the best resource I have yet to see on how to get citations for local businesses.
Much of it will seem like common sense, but most of your competitors
are not doing these things, or if they are, they’re doing 2 or 3 of
them, rather than 20 or 30. All of Beck’s suggestions are great, but one
of my favorites is sponsoring charities that list sponsors on their
websites. Beck says, “There are a lot of great charities out there that
could use business support. To find the right charity for your business
check out Charity Navigator.
You can use the advanced search to find specific type of charities
within your zip code. Be sure to check out the charities websites to see
if they cite their business sponsors, some of them do not.”
Let this also be a hint to charities that they might gather
more SEO-savvy sponsors if they provide those sponsors with citations.
It costs the charity nothing and benefits sponsors by giving them
exposure and SEO benefits. What’s not to love? To see how simple this
is, check out the website for Arizona Brainfood,
a charity that provides needy schoolchildren with proper food and
nutrition. Notice that they prominently placed a “Sponsors” link in the
main navigation at the top of the site, as well as creating a box for
sponsors under the right-hand side of the main image. Their sponsors page
shows logos of all their sponsors, and these logos link to the
respective sponsor websites. Is this the best form of citation? Perhaps
not, they might be more effective for the sponsors were they accompanied
by some identifying text for each company, or if Arizona Brainfood even
provided an entire page for each sponsor, but my gut tells me that
having a mix of citations is healthy, and a linked logo here and there
is just fine.
One citation-gathering suggestion I would add to Beck’s
list is business partnerships. For example, my firm has a subsidiary
that provides websites for small self storage companies. We are
currently integrating the websites we provide with a major software
vendor in the self storage industry. When the time is right, we’ll
approach that vendor to try and become an official partner and get a
citation on their website. Not only do we hope this will drive traffic
to our website, but we’ll get the SEO benefit as well. And we, of
course, will also list that vendor on our website as a partner, since it
adds to our product’s credibility and usefulness. Thus our vendor also
benefits. Note: To anyone who might cry “That’s a reciprocal link! You
can’t do that! Bad!” I’d point them to Tom Roberts’ comments in a discussion on legitimate reciprocal links over at Moz.
Getting citations is not difficult, but may take some time.
It will require that you send emails, make phone calls, and in many
cases invest significant time developing relationships. But like any
business strategy, if it were easy everyone would do it, and it wouldn’t
be a strategy at all. If you invest the time, you’ll see the payoff,
definitely in terms of your SEO results, but in many offline ways as
well.
What citations have worked best for your small business? What
creative means have you found to get more citations? Let us know in the
comments.Refernce : www.forbes.com
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Ada masukan untuk tips seo online shop/umkm secara spesifik?
BalasHapusbebas jerawat
jasa seo surabaya
Thanks for the info! Now i know
BalasHapus