There’s a new tool on the block to help you find citations online. It’s very useful, but before I share it, I want to express how useful it really is.
If you’ve read my guide on Ranking in Google Places, then you’ve completed a full half of what it takes to implement a successful local Internet marketing campaign. This is very important, because you can’t go anywhere until you start moving.
But there’s a second aspect that still needs to be taken care of, especially if your industry is competitive. That step is implementing a strategy to increase the citations (or mentions) of your business online.
What are citations, and why are they important?
Citations are mentions of your business online, not necessarily with a link to your site. Usually, by mentioning your business a site would likely include your contact information (address, phone number, etc.). I first heard about this a few years ago at SMX, when a presenter took the mic.
Now, it’s almost assured to help your business rank in Places, and organically. A big part of our strategy for local SEO clients is to increase their citations in relevant areas online. It’s difficult to gauge the effect, but we’ve caught a few tell tale signs of improvement.
So, what’s this about a tool?
Let’s say you search for a few local-targeted terms in Google. You get the 7-pack or some other variation of Maps listings above/amongst the organic SERPs. But, you aren’t there. Only are your competitors listed, and we simply can’t have that.
Once you’ve ensured proper completion of you Google Page creation and optimization, you’ve seen reviews pulled from third parties and you can even find yourself by digging into Maps. What’s next? We need to increase our citations.
There’s a handy process written by the folks at Ontolo of manually finding the citations of your competitors online using their phone numbers. It seems like a lot of work the first few times you do it, but we can grab all the information we need in under 45 minutes (we do this a lot, so there’s some practice there).
Once that’s done, you still have to go out there and get the citations. We’ll talk about that another time, but so it’s clear, this is a multiple-step process.
Well, not anymore!
A collaboration between Garret French of Ontolo and Darren Shaw of Whitespark, an Edmonton search engine optimization company results in the creation of an awesome Citation Finder Tool. The whole first step is taken care of for you.
What does it do?
I’ve only run it a few times so far, but it appears that it goes through that initial process I mentioned above. You simply supply the search term you are targeting, and you get an email a few minutes later with a:
- list of the competitors that show in the Maps listing for that term
- all the URLs on which citations could be found for them
- and a list of unique domains (so you don’t have to weed through duplicate domains).
Not 4 months ago, a similar process we used to gather this information took literally hours. Now, it’s a matter of a few minutes.
Simply awesome tool. Check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments. I would love to hear the experiences of others.