I often get questions, and pitches, related to our “citation stack” so I figured it made sense to explain the thought process in a post. Our stack consists of 3 things:
Yext
Moz Local
Manual citation audit/cleanup/building
The reason for this is pretty simple. Yext & Moz Local are both pretty affordable tools for making waves right away. We can use Yext and get listings corrected and duplicates suppressed within their publishing network in a matter of minutes. This makes it easy to generate some early headway with clients. With Moz Local we can hit the data aggregators and again get information corrected and dupes suppressed quickly. This is particularly important when dealing with aggregators because it can take FOREVER for sites to update their listings from purchased aggregator data so we also like to get that started right away. This gives us some quick wins for relatively low spend.
Next we do a round of manual citation cleanup and building. Now you may be asking yourself, “Dan you are an on the record hater of citations, what’s up with the manual work?”. The answer to that question is pretty simple, I want to be done with citations for our clients as soon as possible AND I want a comprehensive citation solution. To me, you can’t be comprehensive without a manual process. Business listings are a foundational part of Local SEO, but also, I think, something that people generally spend way to much time on. I want to get those projects over with so we can move on to critical competitive difference makers like link building etc. For more information on what those are check out our 2016 Local Search Ranking Factors. To make that manual process easier we created NAP Hunter to help automate all those advanced searches.
It’s also important to point out, that while citation links might not be huge for SMBs they can be massive for brands. Just consider a company with 500 locations and ~100 citations per location. That’s 50,000 links that can be pushing performance to their money page template (the location page).
So be swift, be thorough, and most importantly get your citations stack out of the way so you can move on to more important things:
6 Response Comments
Hey Dan, thanks for that very helpful information!
One question re Yext: after the first year (it’s still a one-year subscription, right?) do you renew it?
Did you see positive results from using Yext?
They are a client of ours so you can feel free to ignore my opinion, but here are the results of large scale study I lead (starts at slide 23):
http://www.slideshare.net/danleibson/what-about-us-local-seo-multilocation-businesses
If they are still a client we renew it otherwise we recommend they renew it (and let them do it through us).
Hi Dan!
This is Miriam Ellis from Moz. Just wanted to say how honored we our to be in Local SEO Guide’s trusty tool belt. We are lucky to have customers like you guys!
Also, wanted to make a small distinction here in that Moz Local actually closes duplicates rather than suppressing them, which is something a bit cool and uncommon about our product 🙂
I’m personally so enjoying the fact that you guys are blogging more often here since the redesign. You have very quickly become a regular stop of mine each week to see what’s new. Say ‘hallooo’ to Andrew for me, please, and thanks for the much appreciated mention in this informative piece!
Thanks for the kind words Miriam!