Local citations are defined as listings of your business name and address on other webpages – even if there is no link to your website. An example of a local citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your business is listed, but not linked to. Citations can also be found on local chamber of commerce pages, or on a local business association page that includes your business information, even if they are not linking at all to your website.
Citations are a key component of the ranking algorithms in Google and Bing. Other factors being equal, businesses with a greater number of citations will probably rank higher than businesses with fewer citations. Citations from well-established and well-indexed portals (i.e., Superpages.com) help increase the degree of certainty the search engines have about your business’s contact information and categorization. There are over 1000 local listing sites. Here is a sample of some of the more popular local citation sources:
WARNING: If you have inconsistent information on various local citation websites, you may get penalized by the major search engines.
If you are a local business, such as a real estate professional, a local citation rollout strategy is a VERY important factor to your success.