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After physical location and category selection, business citations are the next most important component in getting your business listed at the top of Google Maps. The thing that makes citations so amazing is that once you've acquired them, Google will often times reward your business by leap frogging it ahead of your competition, even if your competition is closer to the city center. Citations matter and they matter a lot.

What Is A Business Citation?
A business citation is nothing more than a mention of your business, which could also include your address and telephone number on a website or blog. The reasons this is important is that it acts as proof to the search engines that your business actually exists at the specified location. The more citations you acquire, the higher up your business will show on Google Maps.

What A Citation Is Not
Many search marketing experts are under the impression that a citation must include a clickable link back to your website. This is not true. All of the search engines including Google, Yahoo! and Bing understand that many businesses don't have a websites and that it would be unfair to punish them for that reason.

Accuracy and Consistency
Citations are how the search engines know that your business actually exists where you say it exists. Therefore, you can imagine how important it is to insure that your business name, address and telephone number are consistent across the Internet.

If the search engines see multiple business names with multiple addresses and multiple telephone numbers showing up on multiple websites, they get confused. And when a search engine is uncertain about the accuracy of your business listing, it is hesitate to promote it. At best your business listing will show up deep in the search results where no one will ever find it.

First Things First
Start by checking the accuracy and consistency of your business listing on the Internet. You can do this by doing a Google search for your business name, business address and business telephone number. Search for each piece of information separately. In doing so you may discover that your business name is attached to an incorrect address or telephone number. If this is the case, correct the information on each website before acquiring new citations.

Check Out Your Competition
The best way to find powerful business citation websites is to do a little competitive research. Find the company in the top position on Google Maps and Bing Maps for your local search term and see what websites are citing them. Bing will show many more citations.

Do this for the top three business listings in your community and work on getting citations from each of those sites. Let's look at an example.

Do a search for "pizza Atlanta." You'll find Rosa's Pizza showing up in the number one position. Then, go to the Rosa Pizza local business listing under the heading, More About This Place and you will find that Rosa has 63 citations. If you click on any of the 63 websites, you will see a mention of Rosa Pizza on that page, or at least the page where Rosa Pizza was mentioned in the past.

You'll also notice that many of the websites citing Rosa's Pizza are local directories and review sites including: UrbanSpoon, AllMenus, Yellowpages, Kudzu and more. Once you see where your competition is getting their citations, it's a simple matter of getting citations from those same sites. And most of the websites that offer the best citations are free.

Most of the citations acquired by Rosa Pizza took years and or a stiff investment in advertising to acquire. And, there are probably hundreds of additional citations for Rosa Pizza that Google doesn't count. By doing competitive research, you will short cut your way to high rankings by only spending your time on the valuable citation sites.

Moving Target
It's important to understand that the Internet is dynamic but not instantaneous. Google, Yahoo! and Bing don't see citations the instant they're listed on another website. Sometimes it can take months for the search engines to discover a citation before giving you credit for it.

On the other hand, if a citation is removed from a website or blog, the search engines will continue to give you credit for it until their spiders or crawlers discover that your citation has been removed.

Conclusion
There are many other ways to acquire citations for your business, but this will get you started in the right direction. If you only acquire one citation a day for the next month, you will be light years ahead of your competition in no time.

About the Author:

Learn how to improve your Local Search Engine Marketing ranking on Google, Yahoo! and Bing from Local Search Marketing expert Bob Sommers at http://www.VisOnTheNet.com Bob Sommers Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii 821 Kumulani Drive Kihei, HI 96753 808-891-0449

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