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.
