kickthat
Power Member
- Sep 18, 2014
- 755
- 1,110
I thought I’d share a quick, and pretty basic tactic for finding and collating competitor citations. Hopefully it is new to some of you.
I’m sure many of you outsource citation work as it can be pretty tedious. There are also a bunch of ‘best citation sites’ lists floating around, so you may just work from those.
However, I believe that the key to success, even in local SEO, is to find what is working well for your competitors and replicate it. Therefore, this little trick helps you to identify the sites on which your competitors have citations and potentially allows you to plug any gaps in your own citation building.
Perhaps it will help some of you working on local SEO clients or sites with a limited budget.
Step 1
Install the Linkclump extension to Chrome. This lets you grab a load of links with a copy and paste. I have no affiliation with the tool and there may be others that do the same sort of thing, I have just used this one in the past and found that it works well.
Basically this will let you hold and drag the right mouse button, and doing so will save any links to the clipboard.
Step 2
Identify your local competitors. Note down their NAP details (Name, Address and Phone Number).
Go to Google and type their name (inside double quotes) and their postcode/ZIP (also in double quotes). You can also exclude their own website with the minus symbol (definitely do this if they have a large site with a bunch of pages).
You should have something looking like this:
“Acme LTD” “10118” -example.com
Obviously this will throw you up a load of results where the company name is mentioned with the postcode/zipcode.
Step 3
Go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Search Settings’ and set the Google results per page to 100. This saves you a load of time going through page after page with only 10 results.
Step 4
Use Linkclump to copy as many results as you like and paste them into Excel. You may end up with some duplicate domains if they are in the SERPs more than once, or if a result has sitelinks.
Also, avoid getting the little dropdown arrow for the cached results else you will end up with a load of unwanted Google URLs.
Rinse and repeat. You can do as many of the result pages as you like. You can switch up and do the competitor name and their phone number instead of zip or postcode. You can do this for multiple competitors.
Once you have your data then you can get as fancy as you like. Remove duplicates, extract the root domain only, count the number of times a specific domain appears across your competitors, throw the sites into a bulk metric checker and only use the highest quality ones – whatever you like really.
I’m sure many of you outsource citation work as it can be pretty tedious. There are also a bunch of ‘best citation sites’ lists floating around, so you may just work from those.
However, I believe that the key to success, even in local SEO, is to find what is working well for your competitors and replicate it. Therefore, this little trick helps you to identify the sites on which your competitors have citations and potentially allows you to plug any gaps in your own citation building.
Perhaps it will help some of you working on local SEO clients or sites with a limited budget.
Step 1
Install the Linkclump extension to Chrome. This lets you grab a load of links with a copy and paste. I have no affiliation with the tool and there may be others that do the same sort of thing, I have just used this one in the past and found that it works well.
Basically this will let you hold and drag the right mouse button, and doing so will save any links to the clipboard.
Step 2
Identify your local competitors. Note down their NAP details (Name, Address and Phone Number).
Go to Google and type their name (inside double quotes) and their postcode/ZIP (also in double quotes). You can also exclude their own website with the minus symbol (definitely do this if they have a large site with a bunch of pages).
You should have something looking like this:
“Acme LTD” “10118” -example.com
Obviously this will throw you up a load of results where the company name is mentioned with the postcode/zipcode.
Step 3
Go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Search Settings’ and set the Google results per page to 100. This saves you a load of time going through page after page with only 10 results.
Step 4
Use Linkclump to copy as many results as you like and paste them into Excel. You may end up with some duplicate domains if they are in the SERPs more than once, or if a result has sitelinks.
Also, avoid getting the little dropdown arrow for the cached results else you will end up with a load of unwanted Google URLs.
Rinse and repeat. You can do as many of the result pages as you like. You can switch up and do the competitor name and their phone number instead of zip or postcode. You can do this for multiple competitors.
Once you have your data then you can get as fancy as you like. Remove duplicates, extract the root domain only, count the number of times a specific domain appears across your competitors, throw the sites into a bulk metric checker and only use the highest quality ones – whatever you like really.
