Cited Resources and Citations

To cite a resource is to show the reader the original source for an idea, information, or image that is referred to in a work. If you write an article that has statistics in it but do not cite the resource where you got those statistics then your website will have less EAT (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) than a website that does cite these resources.

What does that mean?

That means that the website that has cited resources will rank easier than the website without the cited resources.

You can cite a resource right in the text of the website page but you should also cite it in the HTML code as well. Here is how you do it as per Mozilla’s website.

<figure>
    <blockquote>
        <p>It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.</p>
    </blockquote>
    <figcaption>First sentence in <cite><a href="http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html">Nineteen Eighty-Four</a></cite> by George Orwell (Part 1, Chapter 1).</figcaption>
</figure>

Citations

Citations are a method to use to help improve your localized rankings by including your NAP (name, address, and phone number) as a reference to a business.

I have a list of over 300 websites to list your business in for citation and it is available in the paid version of this course.

Some citation places online specify a certain category so it isn’t necessary to submit your business to each one. The complete list that comes with the paid course has the details of which citations hold the most value in the search engine’s eyes. Also, the list has to be updated from time to time because the lower-quality ones drop off the list and don’t exist anymore. It is usually best practice to submit citations that have a higher DA (domain authority) than your own website.

The most important citations to remember are Facebook, Google Business Central, and Bing Maps. Having your business and website listed in these citations helps you to rank locally because of the address being included with your business which lists your business if someone doing the search is close to your business location.

There are tools out there to help you get listed in citations easier, but manually doing them is the best way. I have found that even with the best of tools it does not fill in all of the information that could be filled out and sometimes you have to go back and check on them because some of the provide the wrong information. Also, some of the tools are on a monthly subscription service and once you stop that monthly subscription service they pull all of your business off of the internet. You don’t have to worry about that if you do it manually.

If you are doing a citation for another business other than yourself which is the case with me when I help other businesses you can run into a problem. In order to verify your business you have to prove it by receiving a phone call and entering a verification code or receiving a postcard to the business address with a verification code.

I remember having to sit at another business for 6 to 8 hours setting up citations while the secretary got annoyed having to answer the phone all of the time whenever a new citation was being set up.

If you are setting up citations for your own business then I would recommend doing it manually if you are setting up citations for another business then I would recommend using one of the tools below and then going back and double-checking the accuracy of the listings.

Here are some citation tools that you can use:

  • Advice Local
  • BrightLocal
  • Little Warden
  • Local SEO Checklist
  • Moz Local
  • My Presences
  • ReviewTrackers
  • Screaming Frog
  • SEMrush
  • Synup
  • Tribe Local
  • Uberall
  • Whitespark
  • Yext

In the paid course I go over which ones I would recommend and which ones to avoid.

After your citations are all set up it is a good idea to provide links to the citations that offer a rating system to rate your business. This would help improve the EAT of your website.

If you wish to see which citation sources send you the most visits you can add a tracking code to the end of your website address on the citation website. A tracking code on a link would look something like this.

https://www.yourwebsite.com/location/cityname?utm_source=thecitationname&utm_medium=referral

Then just set up your website under Google Analytics then go to the Source/Medium report and look for ‘thecitationname’ to see the details of the visitors that visited your website from that particular citation website.