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Citations Page

What are citations?​

Citations are mentions of your business name along with another piece of business data (phone number, address, website, etc), and are key in search marketing optimization. Accurate citations help people discover your business, resulting in more web, phone, and foot traffic, which can convert into transactions.

When search engines like Google rank listings, they consider factors such as:

  • Number of citations
  • Accuracy and consistency of data in citations
  • Authority of websites where citations appear

Citations Overview

The Citations tab in Reputation AI lets you:

  • Monitor all citations pulled in for your business
  • Link to the source to view the full citation

The following method is used for searching for citations:

  • Reputation AI searches various combinations of NAP data for more effective results
  • A search runs each week to avoid a large spike in citations and continue finding new ones over time
  • Pages that are found, which are not already listings, become citations
  • Note that a citation may include a page on the business website if two or more of these conditions exist (phone number + business name or address)

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, 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.

Citation Builder helps get your 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.

Frequently asked questions​

Do citations improve my SEO?

Yes. Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data across the web is a strong signal to search engines that your business is legitimate and authoritative, which helps local search rankings.

How often are new citations found?

Reputation AI runs a search approximately once a week to discover new citations that have been indexed by search engines.