Importance of Off-site Citations

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Из курса от партнера University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

533 оценки

University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

533 оценки

Курс 3 из 6 — Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Learn the ins and outs of optimizing a website, from conducting an initial audit to presenting your findings and recommendations. Hands-on activities include learning how to select and apply appropriate keywords throughout a website, incorporating keyword research in a content marketing strategy, and optimizing a site for local search. You will also learn strategies for setting goals and client/stakeholder expectations, building effective analytics and reports, and communicating SEO improvements.

Из урока

Local SEO

Welcome to week 3! In the lessons that follow, you will take a close look at local SEO strategy. You will see how to optimize your Google business pages, on-site content and external references such as citations, backlinks, and reviews to help your local business have higher visibility in the local search landscape. By the end of this module, you should be able to not only describe a bit of the history of how Google displays local searches but also utilize best practices to develop a high quality local SEO approach.

Why's Local SEO Important?2:02

Local SEO History3:58

Current Local SEO Landscape3:38

Organic Search Versus Paid Advertising5:05

Google My Business!8:57

Improving Your Local Visibility10:17

Importance of Off-site Citations4:54

Quality Off-site Link Building8:07

Importance of Customer Reviews7:09

Познакомьтесь с преподавателями

Rebekah May
SEO Manager & Lead SEO Instructor, Lead Qual
UC Davis Division of Continuing and Professional Education

Welcome.

Now that we have covered how you can optimize your website for

local search, let's address what you can do offsite to improve your ranking.

In this lesson,

we'll learn about citations, which are mentions of your business on other sites.

We'll learn about the importance of citations and

how you can begin building them for your business.

Now that we have covered how you can optimize your website for local search,

let's address what you can do offsite to improve your ranking.

As we discussed, one thing Google will look at is whether or

not your name, address, and phone number, appear on your website.

And how consistent this is with mentions of your business online.

The more mentions your business has and the more accurate this data,

the more easily Google can verify that your business is

actually operating out of a specific area and

rank your business higher for keywords relating to your business.

These mentions of your business are referred to as citations.

Citations for local business are like links for normal websites,

except that citations don't actually need a link back to your site.

They just need to mention your business name and

at least your address or phone number, preferably both.

The process of building citations can be long and tedious.

There are automated services that do this for you, but

you can also perform this manually.

When you build citations manually, you can ensure the information is

entered correctly and into the appropriate categories.

This also allows you to keep track of all the sites you have citations on.

In the event you need to update any citations in the future,

many sites will require you to create an account and have a logon.

So having a spreadsheet will allow you to easily keep track of this information.

Note, when you create logins,

you will start receiving a lot of emails from these companies.

So it's advisable to create a second branded email, maybe something like

citations@yourbusinessname.com to use for your citation building.

One additional thing to note about paid services is

that these submission services will often come with a yearly subscription fee.

And, many will remove your citations if you do not continue to subscribe.

I advise researching any paid services carefully before subscribing.

To help myself stay organized during the citation building process

I have created a spreadsheet which you can download and use.

The first five sites in gray are difficult to obtain listings on, but

some paid service will automatically add your citation to these sites for you.

The benefit of these sites are that they provide updates to the majority

of local data aggregators, which equals hundreds of sites.

This can save a lot of time.

The second set of sites, in blue, aren't specific sites, but

reminders to check your local websites and chamber of commerce for listings.

Below that I included some other sites that are useful for

citation building along with the process for verification if there are any.

I included any notes I have about the process under the site name column.

So, if you hover over the name, you will see my notes.

This helps keep track of the status, where the URL is at, and

any applicable fees, as well as potential login information and notes.

I have another tab in the spreadsheet for resources that are useful for

finding additional citation sources such as niche directories.

For example, if you are a lawyer, sites like FindLaw.com

would be applicable to you, but not to most other people.

So it has been left off of this main list.

You should now understand what a citation is, the importance of citations,

and how to build citations to your website.

Now let's look at traditional back links, and how these can help your SEO efforts.

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