A Citation is any website which contains the business’s phone number but isn’t listed under Primary Listings. You will find a list of citations under the Other Citations tab in Reputation Management. If a Mention contains the business’s phone number, then it will be upgraded to a citation. Citations can include directories, articles, blog posts, or any other format. These are typically smaller, hyper-local and industry-specific sites, as opposed to the larger directories listed under Primary Listings, but sometimes include articles from larger publications.
The system uses the following method for searching for citations:
- We search for the complete phone number (including area code)
- Pages that are found, which are not already listings, become citations.
When a business has many listings with consistent listing data, they build a “Citation Effect.” Two primary positive outcomes occur from this effect:
- Google’s WebCrawler finds the same information in multiple places and adds more confidence to their business data, and
- Good backlinks are created, with more sources that refer to the business’s website, which creates better search engine optimization, or SEO.
Listing Distribution helps to get the business’s information out to the four data aggregators, from which many of these smaller directories will pull information. This will help increase the number of citations over time.