How important is cleaning up citations?

[zai21]

My family purchased a business and had a name change. The business which we purchased is over 20 years old and has citations everywhere scattered (incorrect urls, etc). Before I looked into local SEO I had already begun creating profiles a year before.

Today I have updated and added the business to a majority of the top citations. My question is how important is it for me to go back and delete the ones from the previous salon. Has anyone ranked without removing the old ones? Or have you seen an increase once you went through and removed them?

 

[SirLouen]

Nothing special as long as you have updated the original ones. Some search engines that do have your data (for example Apple maps) use some citation sources to add automatically some businesses, if the info is wrong, it may end being wiped. Nothing bad nothing special. Just keep updated the most you can with the latest info from your business.

 

[zai21]

Nothing special as long as you have updated the original ones. Some search engines that do have your data (for example Apple maps) use some citation sources to add automatically some businesses, if the info is wrong, it may end being wiped. Nothing bad nothing special. Just keep updated the most you can with the latest info from your business.

Thank you! Do you recommend to continue to add to say less famous citations? I've seen some crazy lists of 150+ where some I saw were worth putting my site and some not.

 

[SirLouen]

Generally for local SEO it's not bad idea to go for as much citation sites as possible
In my country there are companies that do this for you updating your business in 70+ sites

 

[lbhbochc]

My family purchased a business and had a name change. The business which we purchased is over 20 years old and has citations everywhere scattered (incorrect urls, etc). Before I looked into local SEO I had already begun creating profiles a year before.

Today I have updated and added the business to a majority of the top citations. My question is how important is it for me to go back and delete the ones from the previous salon. Has anyone ranked without removing the old ones? Or have you seen an increase once you went through and removed them?

It's pretty important to get as many incorrect citations as possible fixed. If Google is seeing mixed information about your business it's going to be hard for you to get into the map pack or rank high in organic. If you can't fix the incorrect ones, you need to drown them out with your correct information.

Just as an example, here's a client of mine where for the first couple months I just worked on his citations. You can see where they started taking effect a back in January.

 

[mhtro]

Tip: Avoid yelp.

Yeah build as many as possible. There were tricks shared time ago on how to build trust and all that but Google+ is down and I've not messed with GMBs in minute

 

[Jays Octave]

Citations is best for local results but you are asking about to remove it. My Freind its a method to increase your local awareness for your business. When it comes to lower, you have to fix every one to cleaning.