Top Citation Sources That Can Improve Your Local Search Engine Ranking In Australia
The battle for online supremacy is far from over. Businesses are doing all they can get to gain an entry and a mention online. One of the ways that these businesses have exploited is the use of directory listing. This is where businesses have their details, such as the business name, address and phone numbers featured in directories. Directory listings help make businesses visible, thereby improving their chances of being located by potential consumers.
Because of the vibrant nature of business listing services, there are many online places where a citation can be built to cater to your local business. When building the citations, the focus should be on business visibility and search engine trust. These two core principles will ensure that your business excels at the local search level meaning more clients will be coming your way. Having authoritative and high-quality citations is seen by many experts as the determining factor behind competitive rankings in local search engines.
There are tremendous citation sources that your business can benefit from. Below is a brief analysis of some of them.
Data aggregators
Data aggregators refer to citation sources which supply basic information about your business to clients. This information, which mainly consists of your business’s name, address, and phone number, benefits businesses as they target specific local consumer segments. Data aggregators index information compiled from scouring resources such as traditional phone books, banking and phone records, business registration databases and business membership rosters. Examples of global data aggregators include Infogroup, Localeze, CityGrid and Saturn by Locationary. After compiling, aggregators usually license or syndicate this data to local search engines, including Bing and Google.
Local Search Engines
Local search engines such as Bing and Google send their bots to scour the web for citations to rectify the business information they already have in their database. This exercise happens regularly, meaning these search engines always contain the latest business information. Having your business listed on sites such as Foursquare, Yelp, and Hotfrog can easily enhance search engine confidence in your business location, name, and website. Many businesses in Australia engage in frantic efforts to build their citation to ensure that they are listed in as many local search engines and business directories as possible.
Local Blogs
Local blogs can form great places upon which your business can be listed. The growth of blogs with localized names has increased tremendously. Whenever you conduct a local search for blogs such as locksmith Sydney, you will likely get local companies’ details and additional information about them. The businesses that are linked on such blogs appear trusted and relevant in the local search engine results.
Locally Focused Directories
Local directories, just like blogs, are well indexed on search engines. They are also associated with a particular region or city, such as Perth or Melbourne. Directories that are edited by human beings are considered better off than those that are free for all. However, human edited directors will cost you some money to list. In addition, human edited local directories are considered less vulnerable to spam and, as such, trusted by local search engines. One example of a locally focused directory is Yahoo’s Regional Directory. When conducting searches for local citation sources, you can search with words like “[your city] directory“.
Industrial-Focused Directories
Apart from regional focus, you can have directories focused on certain industrial segments. For instance, if a website is focused on keywords that cover products and services in your business niche, local search engines may include it as a citation source. This is regardless of the geographical focus of these directories. A good example would be a membership directory of a trade organization or a popular blog with readers in a given industry. Local search engines are likely to crawl such platforms for citations.
As it is clearly evident, there are many resources available out there that your business can use. Always do thorough research of such platforms before opting for them. Conducting local searches will give you an idea of the kind of directories that you can use to list your business for maximum exposure and search engine credibility.
