Local Citation Service 100% Manual Local Business Directory Submission Starts at $5

Depends what you mean by helpful. Citations rarely bring customers directly, and most directory listings send very little referral traffic on their own.

What they do is support the thing that does bring customers, which is your Google Business Profile showing up in the map pack. Google cross-references your name, address and phone across directories to confirm the business is real and where it says it is. When they all agree there's more to corroborate. When they disagree there's less.

They're foundation work, not a lead source. A business with a complete profile, real reviews and consistent citations does better than one with two of the three. But nobody's phone rings because they got listed on a directory.

Two things that matter more than the count. Consistency, meaning identical details everywhere, not just accurate ones. And relevance, meaning directories your customers might actually search rather than whatever a bulk package includes.

If you're starting out, sort the Google profile first. Citations after that.
 
Someone asked how long citations take to go live so here's the honest answer.

Some directories publish the second you hit submit. Some sit on it until a human gets round to approving it, on their schedule. Some want you to verify, a postcard or a call to the number you listed, and nothing happens until you do that bit.

So it's not one clock. It's dozens, all running at different speeds, and most of them aren't ours to control.

About 80% go live. The rest are usually just waiting rather than rejected. And the ones that need you to do something will sit there forever until you do it.

If someone quotes you one turnaround time for the whole order, ask what happens to the ones that don't make it.

Details in the opening post.
 
Live and indexed aren't the same thing, and most reports only show the first.

Live just means the directory published it. The page exists, the link works.

Indexed means a search engine has crawled that page and put it in its index. That's the one that does anything for you.

Takes thirty seconds to check. Grab any URL from your last report, search for that exact address, and see if it comes back. If it doesn't, the page is sitting there and nothing has read it.

Worth knowing which one your report is counting before you compare two providers on the number.

Details in the opening post.
 
Before you build new citations, search your old phone number in quotes. Then the old address, and any previous number the business used.

The old number is the one that finds things. A business that moved in 2019 usually still has listings with the old details, and those don't clear on their own.

Worth doing first because building a hundred new ones while forty old ones carry different data puts two versions of the business in circulation. The new ones aren't wrong, they're just outnumbered.

Cleaning twenty old listings is often less work than building a hundred that argue with them.

Details in the opening post.
 
Not every bad listing is worth fixing.

Four kinds that resist it. Scraper sites that never had a claim flow, so there's no owner path at all. Dead directories that still show up for the business name but that nothing reads. Aggregators that re-push whatever they were last given, so your manual edit gets overwritten on the next sync. And listings made by an old agency in an email nobody can access.

Chase those, and you'll burn a week for nothing.

Sort by whether the site still gets used before you sort by how wrong the listing is.

We do that sorting as part of the build, so the time goes into directories that are actually read. One-time pricing from $5, opening post has the details.
 
Old listings outlive the businesses on them.

Directories have no expiry. They only get overwritten. So a business that closed in 2018 is still listed, still showing the old phone number, and that number now belongs to somebody else entirely.

Same thing happens to businesses that are still trading. Move once, and the old address sits on twenty directories nobody thought to check, because nothing clears it out on its own.

We treat that as part of the build rather than an upsell. The audit finds what is already out there before anything new gets submitted, and around 80% of what we submit goes live. The opening post has the details.
 
Five details have to match on every listing you own. Name, address, phone, website, category.

The one that catches people is the phone. Call tracking is built to show a different number depending on where someone found you, which is useful for reporting and the opposite of what a listing needs. Pick the number that goes on citations and keep it out of the rotation.

The website one is close behind. Homepage or location page, http or https, with or without the www. Businesses with more than one location usually point every listing at the homepage, which is the mistake.

Five decisions, made once, then held. We make them during the audit stage before anything is submitted, so the same answer applies to every directory. The opening post has the details.
 
Search a local term, and there are two things ranking, not one.

The map pack is showing a Business Profile. The organic result below shows a page from the site. Different assets, different reasons for sitting where they do.

Most trackers give you one number covering both, so you can be top three in maps with the wrong page ranking underneath, and the report looks identical either way.

Log which one earned it. Takes a column.

We handle the listings side, and every entry comes back with a live URL so you can check it rather than take our word for it. Details in the opening post.
 
Something worth saying to anyone who has found a listing with the wrong details.

You almost certainly did not cause it. Directories pull data from sources you never submitted to, aggregators re-push whatever they were last given, and old entries never clear themselves out. Most of it happens without anyone touching anything.

People assume they broke something and go looking for what they did wrong. Usually there is nothing to find, because nothing was done wrong in the first place.

Worth knowing before you spend a week auditing your own behavior instead of the listings. We start with what is already out there, and around 80% of what we submit goes live. Details in the opening post.
 
Need more citations for a US client. We did 80 for them back in January.

How many additional directories are still available for them, and can you send the list of what's left?
 
Need more citations for a US client. We did 80 for them back in January.

How many additional directories are still available for them, and can you send the list of what's left?
We can do about 300 more, so you can order a 240 citations package or message me for a custom order. Thank you.
 
Something that comes up a lot when people ask why their old citation provider went quiet: they still have the logins.

Ask whose email the directory accounts get registered to before you order. If it's the provider's, they hold the access when the work ends, and getting it back later means asking nicely. Ours go to you. Opening post has the rest.
 
Still building citations for the BHW community by hand since Aug 27, 2013.

15 to 350, one-time fee, no subscription, indexing and boosting included.

Around 80% go live, and the report shows what did not.

Details and ordering in the opening post.
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