Why are citations important?

Citations are useful for two main things:

1. Ranking higher  for local search queries (maybe)
2. Helping people discover your business online

How citations help with local  SEO

Citations are believed to help search engines verify the existence, legitimacy, and trustworthiness of your business. If the same details appear across many relevant and trusted websites, then Google likely has increased confidence that your business exists, is operational, and that what you say about it is  true.

According to a survey by Moz, citations are the  fifth most important ranking signal  for local queries.

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That said, it’s worth pointing out a couple of things about this survey:

1. It’s a few years old. The survey was conducted in 2018. Given that citations have almost certainly been decreasing in importance over time, it’s quite likely that they are less important today.
2. Not all SEOs believe that citations are still important. Even in 2018, there were quite a few SEOs who responded to Moz’s survey saying that citations were no longer of huge importance, and didn’t move the needle all that  much.

That last point is an important one and one that we generally agree  with.

Getting local citations from anywhere and everywhere is unlikely to have a big impact on your local rankings. However, we believe that there’s still some value in getting citations from relevant, trusted sources where people expect your business to be listed.

For the record, here’s what Google’s John Mueller says about citations:

Just because a company name is mentioned somewhere doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good or bad for the company. I’d see those mentions more as advertising — if you think people are going to see it and explicitly search out your business, then that’s great.

How citations help people to discover your business

People don’t always use Google to find local businesses. They often turn to sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and specialist directories like lawyers.com. That’s one of the reasons why it’s useful to get listed on these  sites.

The other reason is that business directories often dominate search results for local queries.

For example, try searching for “plumber nottingham”:

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Very few of the top results are plumber’s websites. They’re mostly business directories that list lots of different plumbers.

Because Google returns these types of results for local searches, you need to be cited there for searchers to find your business.