Citation building is the basis of any ideal local search marketing tactic, and since local search marketing is something I practice, I have decided to let you in on the most prominent citation building secrets.

Introduction

The flexible aspect of local SEO citation building and local search success in general is that you need to specify the obvious: where your business can be found, the operating hours, business phone number among others.

Here is how local search can have an influence on your business:

• 51% of on-the-go searches have local intent
• 88% of users these days search for local information on mobile
  
• Conversions are more than two times as likely with a local search (when compared to other types of searches without local intent)

How is all this related to Citation Building?

Citations help you in building prominence. Prominence is quite important. Google’s local search document states that prominence is one of the top factors it uses in its determination of local rankings.

Prominence is how popular and well-known your business is on the internet. One of the ways Google uses to determine prominence is looking at the amount of information it can find about your business on the internet.

This information Google looks out for includes links, articles, and anything search engines are able to find about your business in directory (citation information). Yahoo and Bing use this information in listing your business in local searches.

Also, citations account for about 13% of how search engines like Google and others rank your business in local searches. This thereby puts citations in the top four factors that search engines, such as Google, use in ranking your business in local searches.