This post continues our series on the 2023 Ranking Factors for Google Local Search. The number six factor is the importance of citations at 7%. This blog is going to cover a lot of facts and statistics. A citation is a web based references to a business's name, address, phone number or other core data. A citation can also be the formal local business listing on a local business data platform, or can be an unstructured data occurring or a simple mention on a website of another business, on a blog, on a news site, or on any online publication can count as a citation.
Google is looking for your NAP data, which is name, address and phone number. Citation volume is a key factor in boosting your rank with regard to citations and search results. Local search visibility increased 91% when distributed to ten or more citation sites over a one year period.
The Value of Citations
Local Search Marketing
The need to be discovered by the public is the best reason for participating in some sort of local search marketing and to get yourself listed on a number of different citation sites. Uberall completed a study that looked at the impact of having citations and and the completeness and accuracy of them. If you have listing on ten plus sites with accurate data, it was shown to result in an 80% increase in Google visibility. In addition, this will give you a 67% improvement in consumers taking some sort of an action on your website.
If you boost your citations from the 10 plus range of citations to 30 plus, the numbers explode. You could be looking at user action increasing by 135%. That will have a huge impact on generating leads, whether it be phone calls or form fill outs, because those are the primary sales actions for someone other than a visitor's on an e-commerce site.
The completeness and accuracy of your listings will result in increased website clicks by almost 70%. Although citations are only 7% of the formula, it is rather simple and inexpensive to have citations built for you and sent to ensure their accuracy. This will really drive traffic to your Google listing will increase click through rate and then you will see a higher percentage, a significantly higher percentage of people taking sales type actions, forms and phone calls and even product purchases on your particular website.
The #6 factor in the list of important factors are Citations at 7%.
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