There are thousands of service providers claiming to offer ranking success via local citations. With so many options vying for your attention, it can be hard to know which is the right service for your business, and, even more importantly, what red flags to watch out for to make sure that you don’t choose the wrong one.
To help out, we’ve put together a guide on local citation bad practices and what to avoid when selecting a citation building provider.
What counts as a citation?
As a reminder, citations are online listings of a business’s information. At minimum, they include the business’s name, address, and phone number (also known as their NAP), but often include other important information like website URL and business categories.
Citations can be structured (like those found on directories) or unstructured (like mentions in a local online news publication). Many citation-building services only focus on structured citations, but some do offer unstructured citations as well.
Example of a structured citation on Yell.com
What doesn’t count as a citation?
Backlinks (which are just online references to your business that include your URL), bookmarks (such as those on bookmarking sites like Tagza or social bookmarking sites like Tumblr or Reddit), and advertisements do not count as citations.
| Good Citations | Bad Citations |
|---|---|
| Trusted industry or local listing sites (e.g., ZocDoc or Business Net) | Temporary bookmarking sites (e.g., Tagza) |
| Industry news or blogs | Mentions on microblogging platforms (e.g., Tumblr or Reddit) |
| Local news or blog | Paid advertorials |
| Profiles on trusted social sites (e.g., Facebook) | Links on low-quality sites |
| Full NAP mention | Links from private blog networks (PBNs) |
| Contains a wealth of accurate, consistent, up-to-date business information | Only contains partial, incomplete, or outdated information |
What to Watch Out For in Citation Services
With quality, accuracy, and consistency all being of paramount importance when creating citations for your business, it can feel like a lot of things to consider. However, with a good citation service provider, you shouldn’t have to compromise on any; the right citation builder will provide timely, accurate, consistent, and high-quality citations at a reasonable cost.
Get Citations Done Fast... and Own Your Listings Forever
No recurring fees. Complete Control. Super-low cost.
Essential Business Information Missing
As we mentioned in What Are Local Citations?, high-quality citations should include as much information about your business as the directory or website allows. This should, at a minimum, include your business’s NAP. However, oftentimes, it will also include other important information about your business, like:
- your website URL
- business description
- social media links
- business categories
- opening hours
- keywords
- accepted payment methods
- driving directions
- images
- email address
- and more, depending on the site.
If a citation service is only asking you to provide the bare minimum information (such as NAP and URL) before they begin their work, it’s likely an indication that they are not interested or able to create high-quality, detailed listings.
When speed or cost appears to take priority over quality, it’s a no-go.
No or Poor Tracking Capacity
When you’re working with an external group, tracking is a key part of ensuring that your citations are of a high-quality and truly working for you. If your service provider isn’t providing a clear, professional dashboard where you can see the citations that they have built for you, or if said dashboard lacks meaningful metrics, it may be a sign to pause and re-evaluate if they are the best service provider for your business.
What you want: a clean, clear dashboard of the citations they have built for you, as well as meaningful corresponding metrics.
What you don’t want: no dashboard, a messy or unclear dashboard, or a spreadsheet attachment with little information.
Unreasonable Speed
Oftentimes, if a service overpromises with suspiciously low costs and an unreasonably fast turnaround time, it’s a good clue that they may not be providing your business with high-quality citations.
Some sites and services boast unrealistically fast—or even instant—new citations. This can be a sign of low-quality or irrelevant sites being used. These services often claim quick results, but are shady about the types of citations they’re building and on what sites.
This can mean that they are creating vague citations for your business on anything from bookmarking sites to advert-only bulletins to niche directories that have nothing to do with your business. These providers will often emphasize the number of citations they can offer you, and the speed with which they can do it, rather than the quality or metrics of said sites and citations.
Complex or Misleading Pricing
Like with any product or service, the provider should be very clear about what they’re charging up front. If any of the information about their pricing is contradictory, confusing, vague, or even missing entirely, it’s a red flag.
Remember: this is a service you are paying for. If your hairdresser outright refused to share how much they were going to charge you before they began cutting your hair, you certainly wouldn’t want to do business with them!
What To Look For in a Citation Builder
The right citation-building provider will offer high-quality, detailed citations at a reasonable cost across vetted, transparent directories. It will also provide a clear dashboard with intuitive metrics.
It should also have a means of cleaning up existing citations, removing duplicates, and keeping your citations up-to-date if your information changes.
The right tool will also ensure that you own your citation rather than “rent” it—AKA, once it’s built, you have complete control whenever you want it (as opposed to some tools, which will remove or revert your citations back if you stop working with them).
Not sure where to start? Check out BrightLocal’s Citation Builder for a service that checks all the boxes.
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