How businesses get local citations without submitting them?
-
How do some businesses get listed in directories like YellowBook, SuperPages, MerchantCircle, etc. without submitting their information. For example, my dad's company listed themselves in YellowPages and Google Places years ago, but also show up in the ones listed above without having submitted the information to them or having paid anyone else to do it...
-
Hi Chase,
Both Wissam and Linda have done a great job of explaining how data in one place gets fed to many others. Do check out the link to David Mihm's graphic. It's excellent.
-
Chase, Wissam's link will help a lot.
But in general many citations, stem from the yellow pages. Many mature businesses I've worked with have never submitted a single citation, yet have 50,000 or more.
If they've been listed in the phone book, it propagates out from there. Many directories scrape the online yellow pages, then other directories scrape those directories. Plus you'll see in David Mihm's visual, many of the back end data providers get phone book data and business listings, then feed the info out to tons of other sites.
-
here is a piece of information collected by David Mihm That lets you understand that when submitting to a few other might "take" or aggregate the new info
Local Ecosystem: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Webmaster tools search analytics - can you get current position (not average ) to show with out having to click through
We are working using Webmaster tools position, then pages. Looking at the average position to improve our page rankings. A lot of our pages are already moving up quite well, so the average is not reflecting the current position Is there a way we can see the current page rank rather that an average, with out having to click through each search, (position, then pages etc.) it is quite time consuming.
Image & Video Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Is getting views to an infographic through Imgur beneficial to SEO?
I'm considering posting infographics to Imgur in addition to hosting them on my site in an effort to leverage Reddit a bit more this year. My concern is that, if all goes well, we'll get a ton of views through Reddit to Imgur, maybe a couple clickthroughs to the site, and links to (probably) the Imgur page. I don't see that Imgur gives your profile a followed link, so how would any of this help SEO. I assume it would, because respected guys like John Dougherty espouse the benefits of Reddit, but I can't see how and I need to justify the effort to my department head.
Image & Video Optimization | | MattHolden1 -
How do you manage phone verification when claiming listings on behalf of clients (local and remote)?
As the top competitive difference maker, Quality/Authority of Structured Citations is pretty important. That being said, I spend a good deal of time manually running around to different citation websites and jumping through their hoops to get my clients' websites listed properly. I've been using getlisted.org to check my sites, and a lot of the citation sources out there require phone verification. Now I was wondering how you professionally manage the phone verification step for your own clients. I've found it a bit difficult getting my clients to reliably get the PIN numbers for me. I've even had problems with clients checking the mail for the post cards that get sent! At this point in time, I try to schedule a time (not during business hours preferably) to go into the location and answer the phone to get everything verified in one shot. For remote clients however, I just have to hope that they are on board with answering their phones and getting the PIN numbers back to me. Lastly, how do you manage to reduce the amount of sales calls that your client receives from these listing sites? I currently register accounts under a separate email address, for example, [email protected]. This cuts down on the email marketing spam, and it obviously helps me stay in control of the listings. How do you handle the phone calls though? Especially from some of the more aggressive companies like Yelp? Personally I've just been 'briefing' my clients on how to respond to these sales calls, and I've educated them on the importance of these listings so they aren't too annoyed with the assault of sales reps calling their business constantly. Are there any magic words that my clients can use with these sales reps to make them stop calling? Sorry for the long post, if you've made it this far thank you for reading!
Image & Video Optimization | | IronSummitMedia0 -
Google + local Multiple Locations
My client has three offices and I have created three separate Google + local listings for them - I have listed the specific locations page as the website address for each - Google specifies to add the coding to the homepage to link Google + however what do we do with the three different codes - does each one go on the home page or at the bottom of the specific landing page for that particular office?
Image & Video Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
Can SEO companies be listed on Google Local, Bing Local, and Yahoo Local?
Can anyone confirm if SEO companies can be listed in the local results for Google, Yahoo, and Bing? I'm asking because when you search for most local terms, it will return their local listings. However, that doesn't appear to be the case when searching for SEO or marketing services - or at least none show up when searching from Houston and I'm pretty sure we have quite a few SEO companies here 😉
Image & Video Optimization | | ChaseCameron0 -
Local SEO company
How important it is to choose a local SEO company based on their location? How can you check their reliability?
Image & Video Optimization | | echo10 -
How To Do SEO For Google Local Listing?
Hi, I have been reading around but i still don't understand how we can rank better for local search listing from Google place. I have tried: Adding keywords to descriptions
Image & Video Optimization | | chanel27
Adding the max of 10 photos And also get my customers to comment on my Google place listing leaving testimonials. Is there any tips? 🙂0 -
City/Town content pages for a local business
Earlier this month I asked a private question on the use of schema for service area pages on a home improvement contractors website. The question led to Miriam Ellis giving me some great ideas about creating content for pages specific to the clients service area. The goal here would be to rank for [roofing contractor + city] using a URL similar to: mycompany.com/service-areas/city-state A great idea Miriam gave me for creating content for these pages: Showcasing a previous project in that city/town with a well-written project description, photos, videos and client testimonials. Her advice is excellent and I wanted to share it with you. I also wanted to open up the discussion and see what others have had success with. If the company is relatively new, and doesn’t have the work history to create pages such as this, what would you do?
Image & Video Optimization | | WilliamCarr0