What is Local Citation Building?
Last updated on February 5th, 2025
If you’re familiar with link building, you may fear citation building is similarly time-consuming, challenging, and frustrating.
Happily, it’s not quite as resource draining as link building. In fact, building and managing local citations is easy to get to grips with, if not execute. While it’s not complex the actual time taken to build citations can be a barrier, which is where listing management tools can help.
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A citation is a mention of your business information shared online. Creating a more robust profile is simply another way of producing more of those mentions.
The best kinds of mentions include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP), along with any supplementary information that may be relevant. This could be your opening hours, web address, or email, depending on where the mention is going to exist online.
You could have built local citations without even realizing it, such as through:
- Social media profiles
- Directory listings
- Event listings
- Review profiles
- Articles
- Aggregators or booking websites
Of course, you can also purposefully set out to grow your current profile by searching for local directories, niche industry sites, social media platforms, and so on, to share your business details.
Related: How to Master Local Link Building – Free Online Course
How many should you aim to build?
As with links, there’s no magic number that you should target. It’s more often helpful to focus instead on consistently building as many good quality, accurate citations as possible.
The bigger your pool of good quality, accurate and consistent mentions, the better it is for your search visibility and consumer discovery.
Another helpful tip is to benchmark your count against your competitors. We know citations are a top-five local search ranking factor, so you should aim for as many local citations — if not more — as your biggest competitor. We’ve studied several industries and calculated average citation counts to get you started.
