Over time, the criteria for getting on the coveted map pack for local results has evolved. We can still break down the criteria among the following factors, yet the emphasis on what is most important seems to shift slightly with each passing year:
- Proximity of business to city center (centroid)
- Quantity and quality of reviews
- Keywords included in the content of the reviews
- Keywords included on the landing page of the listing (where the page links to, which is often times the homepage, but can often times be a geo-landing page should the GMB listing be a satellite office.
- Completely filling out the GMB profile (what goes into 100% completion also changes with time with additional features)
- Authority of the landing page the GMB listing points to
- Subjectively, authority of the GMB listing itself from its own specific backlinks and map embeds
- Quality and quantity of citations from various sources establishing the credibility of the listing
This last one, as you may have guessed, is the focus of discussion. This is because of the rampant amount of listings most frustrated lawyers see in their respective markets that are totally spam. Many don’t have reviews. Many don’t even point to a website. Yet they accomplish the end goal of a solid spot on Google Maps? We have an aggressive yet effective citations campaign to hold accountable.
Learn more from the thorough and illuminating podcast and transcription below.
Paul Warren:
Hi, I’m Paul Warren.
Ryan Klein:
And I’m Ryan Klein.
Paul Warren:
And this is another episode of SEO is Dead and Other Lies. Ryan, how you doing?
Ryan Klein:
I’m doing fantastic. Congratulations on closing on a new home, my friend.
Paul Warren:
Thank you very much. It’s the most fun you’d ever want to have again. It’s just a great time.
Ryan Klein:
Really? You don’t want to go head to head with the listing agent, and then the seller that doesn’t want to move out, and-
Paul Warren:
No.
Ryan Klein:
No? Okay, that’s fair.
Paul Warren:
It’s an eye-opening experience. I’ll say that. Until you’ve gone through it, you really don’t know about it. You can read all the BiggerPockets articles that you want. You just don’t know until you buy a house.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it here in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
Paul Warren:
[crosstalk 00:01:14] been moving all over the place.
Ryan Klein:
I know. I was like, “Where is this guy?” I’m probably going to hang out here for a little bit.
Paul Warren:
You should start up SEO fight clubs in all the cities that you’re in. Just invite-
Ryan Klein:
Okay. Yeah, we’ll see-
Paul Warren:
… SEOs over, and beat them up.
Ryan Klein:
Cool. See how pugnacious the crowd is out here.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, it’s got to be a little different than where you were last at.
Ryan Klein:
Which is, who knows?
Paul Warren:
Seattle.
Ryan Klein:
Oh yeah. Well, I kind of miss … I was thinking about it this morning when I was drinking coffee, the first time that I was little bit missing Seattle. I’m like, “Aw, this coffee’s not as good. This is actually the first time I miss Seattle a little bit of all the things,” right?
Paul Warren:
Seattle’s the birthplace of Moz, right?
Ryan Klein:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.
Paul Warren:
Did you ever go by the headquarters when you lived there?
Ryan Klein:
No. I don’t know where it would’ve been.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, they suck.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, SEOmoz. Remember they dropped the SEO part.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, because they wanted to be more inclusive.
Ryan Klein:
Even though they really just focus on SEO afterwards anyway, but that’s-
Paul Warren:
I like that Rand Fishkin kind of shits on them now.
Ryan Klein:
Does he? I thought that … Well, he still has equity-
Paul Warren:
And [crosstalk 00:02:16].
Ryan Klein:
… for whatever they sell, if ever.
Paul Warren:
He’s definitely very … it didn’t work out well. I think he has a lot of regrets, for sure.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, if you read Lost and Founder. I actually read his book, and it was the low points of his experiences. It was very transparent, maybe a little, almost too transparent.
Paul Warren:
Did he get Steve Jobsed.
Ryan Klein:
I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s exactly … I think he got a point where … I don’t know to say anything that’s inaccurate, but maybe he didn’t feel like he was being as affective of a leader as he was in the past, and felt like it was his time to move on, and had another CEO that he thought was more capable for that phase of Moz to take over. That’s my understanding. If that’s not it, then I’m an idiot and I don’t remember. That’s that.
Paul Warren:
This episode isn’t going to be about Moz, by the way. We’re going to talk about something really, really cool, which is … It’s not really cool, because nothing in SEO is really that cool.
Ryan Klein:
That’s what I always say.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, so it’s cool for us … is citations. We’re going to talk about why they are, why you need them, why they’re important, where to get them, where to get them in bulk, how to manage them. Pretty much, a little bit of everything that you need to know about citation management for your local SEO.
But before we get in that, Moz, it definitely isn’t the company it was. It was like the leader in the SEO industry for a really long time.
Ryan Klein:
I couldn’t tell you when it went away in that direction, because people like MozCon, Seattle’s still the cool, hit tech hub, a lot of startup stuff. People still respect the WhiteBoard Fridays. They’re pretty cool. They go in depth. I don’t know. I don’t know how the clout went elsewhere. I can’t put my finger on it.
Paul Warren:
Well, from a tool standpoint, Moz’s tools, like Open Site Explorer, that’s probably a name that you haven’t heard in a long time.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, you’re right. You’re on to something already. I got it.
Paul Warren:
All of that, that was the standard for the industry. I didn’t know a single SEO that didn’t use Open Site Explorer at the time.
Ryan Klein:
You’re right. That last time I used them must’ve been six or seven years ago. Maybe not that long ago. Four or five-
Paul Warren:
And in just that small timeframe, I mean, I think we were at a legal conference together. What was it? Avvo? What was the one we were at in Vegas?
Ryan Klein:
Lawyernomics. Didn’t they call it Avvonomics?
Paul Warren:
No, it wasn’t Lawyernomics. It was for Avvo, I think.
Ryan Klein:
No, Avvo’s 100% was Lawyernomics, up until the end. They call it Avvonomics before that? Avvocon? Avvoconomics? What are we saying?
Paul Warren:
I remember we saw the person that took over for Moz. It’s a girl. I don’t remember her name off the top of my head, but she spoke at it and she did a really good job. But man, pretty much since that time, about 2013, 2014, they’ve just disappeared. I can’t think of any major SEO practitioner that would recommend their tool sets over the better ones out there.
Ryan Klein:
I think what happened is, you just had the sense of some other tools that kept them really hitting it with the community. They kept on rolling out new features and functionality, and it kept on being what people were looking for.
And ever single time Moz was rolling out new features, people were like, “This isn’t on point.” And I think that’s what started to create the gap, now that you mention it, because at the core of everything, it was always a tool. Moz, SEOmoz, I’ll put the SEO back in there, they were an SEO agency.
And then they spent a lot of time developing tools, and then they pivoted into straight up the tools.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, and they’ve just been playing catch up ever sense.
Ryan Klein:
Mm, Ketchup. We can start with citations by doing a segue with how Moz was trying a lot of different products. And they were actually doing Moz Local, which was one of my first times being exposed to a third party building citations for me, besides [crosstalk 00:06:10].
Paul Warren:
Yeah, Moz Local. So we will talk a little bit about them as a tool set that you can use. But let’s first talk about what a citation is, right? A citation is a reference to your business on the internet, just in the same way that the yellow pages existed as a phone book, it still exists in a different form, but online through different data aggregators.
Now, there’s some major ones out there. So why is this important? Why would you even care about this, right? Because it’s a really fundamental part, I believe, still, to Google’s local algorithm. So showing up in the NAP packs, Google has to have accurate information about a business location to verify, in order to trust it and show it up higher than another location.
So it needs your name, and address, and phone number, your NAP. There’s even another. Well, it’s a NAPL, which is name, address phone number, lander, or landing page, so-
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, the URL is there oftentimes as well, so why not?
Paul Warren:
I don’t know how … I mean, that’s just important for link building, in general, to whatever page it’s pointing to. But the key thing of it is, the accuracy of your name, your address, and your phone number. So some of the bigger ones are Infogroup.
It’s important to understand that there’s a few major businesses that own all of these, right? So you can even go to yellowpages.com or whitepages.com. They’re all owned by the same company. Your ability to update your information on these websites is generally going through a certain provider.
Most of them have primary relationships with Yext, which is why I don’t like Yext, but they have the most amount of connections to update this information if it’s incorrect. And the worst thing about all of this is, all of these websites, these data aggregators, they’re very, very lazy.
So they’ll pull information, initially, from some … I don’t even know where it first comes from … some business-registration website or something. In Florida, we have Sunbiz. So it must crawl some sort of government website for businesses.
And whatever it finds on there, it’s going to publish it. And these other websites will craw each other, and if the information is wrong, they think it’s a new business and not the same business. So if it’s the wrong phone number, maybe you change locations and you update your phone, but you don’t update it on whatever other thing.
Now, you have multiple listings. In the ecosystem of these websites, there’s hundreds and hundreds of them. If you add in stuff from Canada, there’s like 400-plus websites, right?
Ryan Klein:
Paul, you know what’s funny about this conversation so far is that, you could almost argue in some ways that citations are just the most complicated aspect of all of SEO in some ways, because they’re just like, “Wait a second. How the hell does this actually work?”
Paul Warren:
They’re the most giant pain-in-the-ass concept in all of SEO. It’s a very simple thing, right? It’s just your name, address, and phone number. The minutia of it is interesting, right? So let’s say you have a suite that your business is located.
That’s pretty normal for your business to have a suite number. And the way that you refer to it in Google My Business might be spelled out, suite. On your website, it might be abbreviated. On another website, it might just be the hashtag or the number sign, and what the suite number is.
The verdict’s still out of how important it is for that stuff to actually really match, right? Or do you abbreviate boulevard or do you spell it out? Or you abbreviate street, right? So there’s all these tiny, little things. Some of the websites, you can’t even have the same format in it.
So I don’t know how important it is to really have it that accurate at that level. Some people will argue til they’re blue in the face that it is important. If you’re a listener and you think it does, and you have a case study you want to show me, I’d love to look at it.
Essentially, going back to what we were talking about, a citation, right? That’s all it is, right? It’s just a reference to your business with the name, address, and phone number on any other website that exists out there.
Ryan Klein:
I think, for me, just the thing that’s always the most confusing and most complicated is just the fact that, going back to almost when you said that there’s main aggregators, right? So you said, what? Infogroup is one of them?
Paul Warren:
Yeah, that’s one.
Ryan Klein:
I believe that Localeze, or something like that.
Paul Warren:
I think Infogroup and Localeze is the same company now.
Ryan Klein:
Oh, jeez, so here we go.
Paul Warren:
We’ll talk about the tool sets here in a minute, that’ll show you what your accuracy is across some of these local aggregators. But there’s like eight super important ones that feed into all these other websites. If you ever just Google Image the local SEO ecosystem, you’ll see how massive the footprint is for these websites, right?
So things like Apple Maps pulls from other ones. Bing is even a thing, like Bing Maps. MapQuest, even though it’s owned by Google, is also one, but update it at a different place than you would update something else, right? So it’s just a giant mess. It’s a shit show, honestly.
Ryan Klein:
I think that’s the point that I want to get to. My first in-house job working at Richter Marketing, I remember the discussion with the boss. “Which boss we talking about?” Mr. Billy Bill. One of the biggest things that really bothered him is just, “I think that my address and my phone number’s all mess all over the place.”
I remember my first exposure to citations was really … Before I even called it citations, I thought they were mostly business directories, which oftentimes can be very confusing, just to add to the [crosstalk 00:11:57].
Paul Warren:
I think they are. That’s essentially what they are, right? They’re business directories.
Ryan Klein:
But you’ll see that sometimes, that it’s not so much a directory where people go there to really find out about the business as it is. It’s about their location, and it’s very location-map-geo-coordinate oriented. So that’s when it’s purely probably a citation.
Paul Warren:
And the worst part is that most of these websites, I can’t imagine what their traffic actually is outside of people updating citations on-
Ryan Klein:
Gosh, 0?
Paul Warren:
It’s got to be insignificant. Think about Best of the Web, or Hotfrog. If these are new words to you, new website names, it’s because you never go to them, right? The only reason I know about them is, because I have to go to them to update listings about different locations. I have like 700 locations I have to keep track of [crosstalk 00:12:51].
Ryan Klein:
The number goes up ever conversation. Remember when it was 10? No, it was always like 500.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, well, they keep opening more stores unfortunately, so I guess I’m doing too good of a job.
Ryan Klein:
No, it’s all you. The salespeople selling franchises are doing a great job.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, they are actually. I think they’re opening 10 this month, actually, so it’s doing pretty well. But one that’s important to note about citations, there’re two different types. There’s a structured citation and there’s an unstructured citation.
So a structured citation, you can really just look at the URL of where it’s at, right? So if it has something like a city and then a business type in it, and then the name of your business, think about how that is structured, right? And it’s structured in such a way to let Google know very quickly what you’re talking about from just the URL.
So anything like that, which would be business directories, what Ryan was talking about, is a structured citation. Things that are unstructured are just references to your business, your name, address, phone number out there, your NAP, on other websites.
So this could be a ton of different things. You could sponsor a little league, and they have a page on their website where they’re like, “Hey, thanks to our sponsors. Come visit blah, blah, blah at this location,” right? So it’s still a reference to your NAP that’s going to get crawled by Google.
But it doesn’t haven’t that actual structure in it necessarily on the page structure to let Google know this is what a NAP is either. It’s still really valuable. They’re both extremely valuable in different ways. I would say structured ones aren’t as valuable as unstructured, because it’s essentially like a link from a local source that’s endorsing you.
Anyone can get structured citations, which is what we’re talk about next, how you get them.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, sure, and that’s always what I would’ve liked to know eight years ago, instead of me going in and then doing quotations in the random search term, and then going through literally dozens, if not hundreds, of locations, and trying to figure out, scratching my head, “How the hell do you edit it here?” And then finding out later on that there’s aggregators.
But the question I want to ask you to really kick it off is, if there are these main aggregators, right? And you said that there’s eight of them or so. When I was even attempting to do this, I think that there were three of four, so I don’t even know what happens.
But how come people just can’t go to these big dogs and be like, “Just do it right the first time”? Why are people going through so many different channels, so many different hoops, talking to local SEOs and citation companies to do it, if the aggregators [inaudible 00:15:29] they are ones that are supposed to be doing it?
Paul Warren:
Well, because all of them aren’t created equal. When I say, “All of them,” I mean the aggregators aren’t, right? So some of them have relationships with third-party tools. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s about money, right? So a company like Yext has been able to capitalize on their tool set with all these other … bring all these other websites into the fold, and allow you to update your stuff in realtime, and suppress duplicate listings out there.
So being able to suppress duplicate listings is as important as being able to update incorrect ones, right? But not all of them have gone with Yext, so it’s split. And there’s some of them that don’t want to sign up with any aggregators. They want to control that data themselves.
And they want to charge you whatever fee a year to update that information, that you’re going to end up having to pay. So that’s really the main reason. The really interesting thing is, if you did nothing at all, your business would probably be in all of them at some point. It just might take a really, really long time.
It would take, probably, too long for you to enjoy a lot of really good ranking from it, especially if someone has an aggregator, right?
Ryan Klein:
Like 100 years?
Paul Warren:
It wouldn’t take that long, but it would take a while, because one of the bigger issues with citations, even once you get the information correct, or you’re updated, or whatever, I mean, some of these websites have millions of pages.
So the information isn’t necessarily indexed by Google in a very timely manner. So if you’re not forcing it to get indexed with a tool or something, like eliteindexer.com. I don’t get any kickbacks from that-
Ryan Klein:
Oh, what was that endorsement. Wait, you’re making deals without me? [crosstalk 00:17:08].
Paul Warren:
No, I’m just kidding. I do use that one, but obviously, we don’t make any money off it any of them. But there’s a bunch of them out there. But if you’re updating that information, and then once it finally does get indexed, it takes probably about three months for it to really influence the ranking algorithm on local, I think so, anyways.
Ryan Klein:
Wow, that’s kind of a ways. It’s funny. You mentioned the indexing citations, because we don’t really treat backlinks the same as citations, even though citations do have the benefit of a backlink. I would never look at a citation strategy the same as a authority-building strategy, because citations websites are literally going to be thousands, and thousands, and thousands of pages. OBLs through the roof. I mean, and they’re going to have control of the anchor text.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, links are only good if your competitors don’t have them. If they do have them, it’s going to be diminished, right? So if everyone has a Yellow Page link, you’re not going to see a big benefit from that. So that’s why link building is really a separate discipline.
It shouldn’t be lumped together with this. Also, that will more influence the organic rankings below maps, which moves way, way faster, right? You can build a few a links in with … I mean, honestly, a week, you can boost something with that if it gets indexed really quickly, especially if whatever is linking from goes viral, or if it has a lot of traffic going to it. It can super boost it.
So local SEO is a slow long game for the most part, especially, it’s a preexisting location that has a bunch of screw ups in the citation side.
Ryan Klein:
I’ve seen big jumps in the maps typically, but not just because of citations. A lot of things may be simultaneously. I know this isn’t a podcast about local SEO, because we’re not really going to be talking about a lot these disciplines. But citations, plus getting reviews, plus optimizing the profile maybe could help.
But if people are really situated in the maps already, and they’re already doing a lot of great things, it’s going to be hard break in that three pack. Remember that seven pack? Man-
Paul Warren:
Oh, man, that was great.
Ryan Klein:
… those were the days. [crosstalk 00:19:18].
Paul Warren:
That would change my life.
Ryan Klein:
Seven. Then I remember it went to five. Then it went to three. As far as citation opportunities you’re talking about, I know this is almost interview style, it’s probably only going to be the last one where I put you in the spotlight directly and ask you a question. But it’s something that I’ve thought about [crosstalk 00:19:39].
Paul Warren:
Bring it.
Ryan Klein:
Bring it. So you know for me if it’s going to be the situation, not going to be the easiest question. You might not even know it, but we’ll see.
Paul Warren:
I’ll make something up. I don’t know.
Ryan Klein:
Go for it.
Paul Warren:
Let’s find out.
Ryan Klein:
Don’t tell anyone this is really what you think. What I was thinking about is, when it comes to backlinks, one of the great things about it, building authority for organic positioning, is that you can just do a tool whenever you like. You’re like, “[inaudible 00:20:08],” wherever else you like.
And you can get backlink analysis. You can uncover a big portion. And then you have a backlink analysis that probably will establish how someone got authority, why they’re ranking well. But with people being on maps, and we know how important citations are and how much they can influence your position on maps.
How do we create a report or get a breakdown of the citations that people have been acquiring? Is there a tool for that to find opportunities?
Paul Warren:
That’s a good question. There’s a lot of tools that will audit your listing, and lot of whatever you want. Whatever you put in there. So you can audit competitors. But I will say that a lot of them aren’t super accurate, because they off their own historical index of it, and not necessarily what’s actually live on the site.
So I can have citations that I know are live, that I just made a month ago, and it’ll show on that too, it’s not there. It doesn’t exist, right? Some of them, let’s say if you’re using something to manage them, like a Yext or whatever, sometimes it just takes a while for it to get updated on that site or get made, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
There’s no way to force it to be made, outside of what you already done, right? So ultimately, this is what I do. I don’t necessarily worry about what my competitor’s number is. There’s a range. There’s a number that you want to hit for citations. You want to average over 80.
There’s been a lot of studies on this. That’s sort of the magic number for the websites that are in the top three in the NAP pack. So if you can hit that number and go above it, you have a really high likelihood of ranking in the NAP pack, especially if you have an authoritative website and you have an organic ranking to go along with that, locally, you’re usually going to do pretty well.
I mean, one of the best ways just to see what’s out there that I’ve always done, is I just Google a NAP. I Google one of the competitors, and see just what’s indexed and what shows up. That’ll show you a lot of stuff that you maybe didn’t even think about, like local directories and crap like that.
But, I mean, again, you can use all these tools. They’re only going to show you the websites that they have some sort of a connection with, or a historical index with. It’s not always going to be accurate, so you’re going to have to double check it.
It’ll give you kind of a starting point, but at the end of the day, I think the best way to do it is, you just start Googling stuff, especially if you know you have a probably, like you have a duplicate listing out there with the wrong phone number, Google the wrong phone number and just see everywhere that it exists, right? And then figure out how to get rid of it.
Ryan Klein:
I think that’s great advice. I think if there’s something to look forward to, or something beneficial about the citation approach, or your citations campaign opposed to backlinking campaign, it’s that if you do find citation opportunities, it’s oftentimes going to be much more within reach than a backlinks strategy, because with citations, everyone can really access the same citations, as opposed to you do a backlink analysis, and they’re like, “Oh, crap, my competition is going to be number one forever, because they have 50 .edus, and they have a Forbes article.
“They have Above the Law article. They have all this great stuff.” But citations is a little bit more level playing ground, because it’s like, “Okay, I see what they’re doing. They have a very cohesive NAP. They have a lot of great citations. They’ve been number one on maps forever.”
But I do have access to more citations because I’m going to put in a little bit more effort than them, then maybe you can compete. So it’s one of these things where it could end up being low-hanging fruit, as opposed to a full-blown expensive timely backlinking campaign.
Paul Warren:
Well, I am going to give a little bit of advice at the end of this, some stuff that you can do to boost your citations, that are going to help you too. Let’s say all things are equal here. There’s only 80 out there. There’s only 80. All your competitors have 80. You have 80, right?
What are you going to do? Well, I mean, a little bit that’s going to go into the authority of your entire domain. If you’re more authoritative website, you’re probably going to rank higher than one that’s less. It’s not all the time, but I’d probably say 80% of the time that you’re going to pop up-
Ryan Klein:
Really? Because Kyle was doing a pretty good job there, a few weeks ago, dispelling the whole thing. Not to completely write it off, because I still agree with you.
Paul Warren:
Whatever Kyle did, Google undid it after they figured it out.
Ryan Klein:
That’s fair. But just in my line of work, it’s just a little disheartening to see the listings pop up without even a website link on there. It still happens, which effectively means that it’s not pointing to a landing page with authority in it effectively.
Also, it does say that this listing has acquired some spot in the top three without observing any authority whatsoever from a landing page.
Paul Warren:
Oh yeah, and there’s a whole ranking-factor list of things that’s pretty accurate. I mean, one of the things that’s biggest on there is the keyword and the name of the business, right? So you always see people stuffing keywords in there, like, “I work in the phone-repair industry.”
Ryan Klein:
I love it. [crosstalk 00:25:29].
Paul Warren:
This is the name of a business, no joke. It’s like, “Whatever Repair, $59.99 iPhone Screen Repair, Samsung Repair.”
Ryan Klein:
That’s a DBA [crosstalk 00:25:40].
Paul Warren:
” … Repair Near Me.” That’s the actual name of the business in Google My Business, right? So it’s fraud and just lead generation websites are all over the place in maps, because Google does give a lot of weight to there being a keyword in the name of the business, unfortunately.
When you think about it, every link that you build with the name of the business is going to be a link with the keyword in it, when you’re doing that too. So that’s pushing all that stuff up.
Ryan Klein:
That’s true and it’s branded.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, it’s branded.
Ryan Klein:
Isn’t that crazy, that something as silly as that works?
Paul Warren:
And you can try and get them removed, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t really think Google give much of a shit about it, because they don’t make any money … that much money off of Google My Business yet.
Ryan Klein:
That’s true. They’re like, “Click on our LSA. Stop clicking on our organic stuff. Get over it.”
Paul Warren:
Yeah, they’ll ban your AdWords account for just doing legitimate stuff all the time. But when it comes to spam, they don’t really care, in the maps. But let’s talk a little bit about … I am going to end with some stuff that you can do to boost your rankings and your citations, and the power of them, at the end of this.
But let’s talk about some tool sets that you can use. So if you’re like, “Hey, starting a new business,” or, “I have an existing business. There’s some crap out there I need to fix,” well, what do you do? I got some great tools you might want to check out. One is Yext.
We hate it. We’ve talked about how much we hate them before, in the past, because they are … I would say they’re the leader in citation management, wouldn’t you?
Ryan Klein:
I mean, as far as how many people use it, yes. Their business model seems to have changed quite a bit over the years, though.
Paul Warren:
Well, yeah, they’re trying to become more of a landing-page company, where you can build and send traffic to landing pages, and all types of stuff like that. So they’re definitely trying to venture out into other areas. They’re still probably the most profitable, and they have the biggest budget of any of these tools.
There’s some smaller tool sets. I would say BrightLocal is another one. That’s a much lower price point. Yext is going to cost you probably, at the cheapest, $375 a year, for one location, right? And you’re going to have to buy this license. They have tiers of how many websites are in it, depending on what you get. You can end up paying $500 a location, and it just sucks, right?
Ryan Klein:
It doesn’t sound like they changed that much at all. Jeez. Not making a good case for them right now.
Paul Warren:
Well, I’m just saying, if you can afford it and you got a ton of locations, go ahead and do it. If you maybe got three locations or one location, there’s other options I would probably go to before that, unless you can get a really good deal where it’s like $200 a year or something like that. Like they’re running a special.
The other ones are BrightLocal and Whitespark. So both of those are pretty good tools. They’re pretty good at auditing and telling you what you need. Again, they’re not always the most accurate. You’re going to have to manually get on there and check it yourself.
But they have some pretty good connections. The way that Whitespark works is, it’ll tell, “You don’t have anything on this website,” and if it has an API connection, it’ll allow you to build it on through the tool. You don’t have to do that.
And if you don’t, it’ll just link you to the page where you submit your business information. Usually, there’s a fee for that, though. It could be something like, I don’t know, $20 a year, up to like $80 a year for some of them. Some of them are really shitty, because it’ll allow you to add your business listing, but if something’s wrong, you have the pay a yearly subscription to update it.
So you could have not put it on there. They could’ve just crawled some other website and put a listing for your business, and it’s incorrect, and then they charge you to put the right information on there, which is insane, right? But it’s just how it is.
And then the other one, BrightLocal, works pretty much about the same way, right? So they’re pretty equal tool sets. The other one that’s a cheaper option, SEMrush, actually has a citation-management thing now. I’ve used it before. It’s a lot scaled down, compared to the other ones.
It’s a lot cheaper though too. So if you’re not in a super competitive niche, you might check that one out.
Ryan Klein:
I’m just going to say that one stinks-
Paul Warren:
It stinks?
Ryan Klein:
… based off of just that they were going to come on the podcast, and then they kind of just wasted our time.
Paul Warren:
Oh, yeah. You know what? Yeah, I don’t like then anymore.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, they were-
Paul Warren:
[crosstalk 00:30:17] is better.
Ryan Klein:
… going back and forth and decided that, for some reason, they just don’t want to do it. Oh, I think they stood us up on one of the calls too. It was literally scheduled and we were waiting in the room, and they didn’t show up. So I’m going to say that, that SEMrush citation checker is probably bad. So how about that?
Paul Warren:
So don’t use SEMrush. They’re garbage. We’ll move onto the other one, which I’m about to test out with my friend’s business right now, which is Moz Local. Now, I used Moz Local back in the day. You can scan … You used to be able to, at least, scan your business for free in there, and it would show you the accuracy of the location listing.
And now, it was really limited to the amount of websites that it could update stuff on. I think there was 15 on there. But they were kind of the major data aggregators. Some of them aren’t a traditional data aggregator, but it could be like Yelp, right?
So it could tell what your listing is on Yelp. But if it’s accurate, you’re still going to have to go onto Yelp yourself and update that. It’ll tell you what it is on Facebook, but there isn’t really an API connection with Facebook like that, so you still have to mainly do it.
But it’s at least giving you an audit, and telling you what information is accurate out there. It’s pretty affordable too. It’s one of the cheaper ones. I think they are yearly fees, except for BrightLocal and Whitespark. I think those are monthly fees. But everything else is on a yearly basis.
Ryan Klein:
I really like Whitespark, especially, too, it’s just nice to work with companies that are trying to be thought leaders too, and putting out good content, doing conferences too, have people that know local SEO that write blogs and articles, and contribute, I guess, to the community.
And I think, BrightLocal and Whitespark, maybe Whitespark especially, they do their own webinars, which [crosstalk 00:32:07].
Paul Warren:
That’s a great point out. I believe if you ever are listening you want to check out a good source to learn about local SEO, it’s a pretty good source, is the local SEO forum. It was purchased by an agency called Sterling Sky that I’ve used to do audits before in the past, and they’re definitely very white hat. And I don’t say that as a compliment. But they’re smart people. They know what they’re doing.
Ryan Klein:
Are you not envious?
Paul Warren:
Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily … I mean, maybe I just like … You could say that I break the rules, but then there never were any rules, Ryan.
Ryan Klein:
No, what is this talking about? No, exactly.
Paul Warren:
But I mean, they’re definitely a white-hat business, right? So you’ll learn some good stuff on there, but one of the head people at Whitespark regularly contributes to that forum. So you can talk to them. He’ll answer your questions. He’s a cool person. He’s answered some for me before.
They’ll post case studies anytime there’s algorithm updates on the local side. They send stuff out right away. And they’re like, “This is what we’re seeing,” because they can see the whole mountaintop level of how everything’s being affected from all their accounts. They’re definitely right there.
There some other agencies out there that it really would only matter if you have a lot of locations, enterprise-wide, that aren’t available just to a small mom-and-pop shop, that I’ve checked out before. And they’re pretty great too. I’m not necessarily going to give that. If you really-
Ryan Klein:
What did you arrange in advance again? Just tell me. As long as you get paid and you give me a portion of what you arranged.
Paul Warren:
Oh, no, I didn’t arrange anything. I was actually checking them out against Yext, but Yext ended up giving us such a good deal, I couldn’t end up going with them.
Ryan Klein:
Well, you actually have a higher level, like a manager, right? Or account manager, just because of [crosstalk 00:34:13] X, or you have X locations?
Paul Warren:
I got three full-time account managers on our team for our account. So they spend a lot of time on the stuff that we give them, because we’re a really big account for them, or at least, I think we are.
Ryan Klein:
Well, I mean, that’s just one interesting point. Not everyone of our listeners has 1, 2, 5, 10 locations. If you’re listening and you have dozens, or potentially hundreds of fake or really locations, virtual offices, or brick-and-mortars, there’s going to be some sort of different arrangement, or there’re different teams that you’re going to want being proactive.
Paul Warren:
Yeah. I can negotiate a much cheaper location price per location, than what the average person can, because we have so many of them, right? So there’s a lot of leverage there. There’s some other tools out there. If you want to message the podcast or email us, I’ll tell you what they are.
It’s not really useful for the average listener, because you have to have a minimum of a $15,000 investment to get an account.
Ryan Klein:
That’s some really money, Paul. But what happens if people have $15? That’s gives me one last thing, and this is something that’s a question. It’s not interview spotlight for you. But you do go onto your … I don’t like saying Fiverr … but places like Fiverr. Maybe like your [inaudible 00:35:35] legit, they’re actually selling packages or smaller packages for smaller businesses that are citations, and not necessarily links.
I feel citations are a little bit more homogenous where you don’t have to worry about them being like spam. They’re just citations or citations. Do you agree with that, or do you use maybe something else?
Paul Warren:
I mean, you want to check out … probably start small, and see that the work that they do is right. But I’m glad that you brought that up, Ryan, because even with the best tool, you’re not going to get to 80, for the most part. You’re not going to hit that magic number.
So you’re still going to have to do a little bit of the work on your own. So I use a great guy that you introduced me to. His name’s [Labdy 00:36:20]. He’s in India, and he does a freaking fantastic [crosstalk 00:36:24].
Ryan Klein:
Who the heck is that? I don’t know who’s that? Yeah.
Paul Warren:
Really? [crosstalk 00:36:28].
Ryan Klein:
Cool.
Paul Warren:
You guys used him. I got him from Cory, which is your-
Ryan Klein:
Oh. Oh, yeah. You know what’s funny is, now that you mention is, when I have clients, potential clients that are like, “You’re doing all this work. Do you outsource anything? What are your content links?” I said, “Listen, everything is in house, from the content, to web dev, to on page, to even the backlinks.”
It’s not even that common. Most people outsource it. But I was like, “But listen, there’s one thing I’m just going to be straight up with you, is that we 100% have a third part for citations, because I would not wish citation building on my worst enemy.”
Paul Warren:
Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s [crosstalk 00:37:08]. I mean, it’s monotonous, especially if you’re doing it for a [crosstalk 00:37:12].
Ryan Klein:
Backlinking can be cool, when you’re like, “Cool, I have access to this DA 30 website, and I’m going to get a good piece of content. I’m going to control some of the external links-”
Paul Warren:
Yeah, or pitching. If you get a pitch accepted on a big-time website, and you get a author profile on there.
Ryan Klein:
It can be exciting.
Paul Warren:
It’s cool.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, people are like, “I got a link here,” right? Then who is this world is going to be like, “I got a citation here”? It’s like, “No.” [crosstalk 00:37:37].
Paul Warren:
It’s awful.
Ryan Klein:
No such thing.
Paul Warren:
For 50 cents a listing, his company, he’s got several employees, they’ll audit your stuff out there, they’ll find where it’s missing, and they’ll add it for you. And they’ll find all the stuff that’s wrong and they’ll tell you, and they’ll fix it for you too.
Ryan Klein:
So you’re telling me that’s what I already do for my clients, and I didn’t know it?
Paul Warren:
Yeah, that’s right.
Ryan Klein:
Oh, good for me.
Paul Warren:
So I get 100 additional citations that they find out there, and they add to each location that we have. So we’re well over that 80 average number. We’re doing that right now, currently, with several of our locations.
Ryan Klein:
Oh, awesome. Glad we found them. Shout out to Labdy.
Paul Warren:
It’s several [crosstalk 00:38:19] 75. He’s doing it for him right now.
Ryan Klein:
Shout out to part of our process I forgot about.
Paul Warren:
Actually, I will recommend Labdy. He does a great job. If you are interested in using his services, you can fucking email me after this, and I will give you his contact. He’s pretty great.
Ryan Klein:
Honestly, that’s high praise. I mean, you take your citations pretty seriously, and you talk trash about everything. So [crosstalk 00:38:44] pretty good.
Paul Warren:
But the other thing about it is, you can manually make a lot of these things, honestly. Not all of them have to go through a data aggregator. So you can do the work yourself. If you just Google list of citations, there’s probably a website out there.
I mean, I might do this after the podcast and put it in the description of it, just to help you guys out. Of all the websites that you can just mainly go and build this on. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s boring. You’re just submitting for a profile. You’re making a profile on a website, and you’re doing it a bunch of times.
Ryan Klein:
It’s literally the worst.
Paul Warren:
It is. It’s the height of tedium. And then you have to make sure it get indexed afterwards too, right? So you can do it. If you’re poor, you don’t have any money, or you just don’t want to invest in it, whatever it is, you can do it yourself, it just takes a really long time.
Ryan Klein:
Did you just poard? Where it’s like you’re poor and board at the same time?
Paul Warren:
Oh, poard? Yeah.
Ryan Klein:
That’s what it came … Oh my gosh, that’s poard.
Paul Warren:
You’re definitely going to be board.
Ryan Klein:
If you’re board [crosstalk 00:39:39].
Paul Warren:
But yeah, let’s say you just don’t have the budget for that kind of stuff, you’re on a shoestring budget, you can do it on your own, for the most part. So that covers that. Now, let’s talk about one thing that I really, really like. I’m really giving out some secrets here.
And that’s how to power up those citations, right? And it’s really easy. You’re going to go back to a traditional thing in SEO, and that’s link building. So if you link build two your citations, and you provide authority to that page, it’ll pass that authority onto your website. And it’ll make that citation more important, actually.
Ryan Klein:
One thing too you should mention is that, it actually used to be a practice. Not really, I haven’t seen it much in the past couple of years. But it used to practice to actually rank citations, because they’re already inherently so authoritative that you could actually just piggyback off the authority, and rank citations. So we used to rank Yelp listings. You remember that.
Paul Warren:
That’s a really great SEO tactic called barnacle SEO, and it can be used on a ton of different websites. It’s used a lot in reputation management, where, let’s say there’s some bad press about you out there when you Google your business name. So you start building profiles on high-authoritative websites.
And you build a bunch of links to those with your business name in it. And all of a sudden, the only thing in the top 20 are these websites about yourself, right? So think about like your Yelp is a good one. Your Facebook profile. Your BBB profile, right? It could be your glass ceiling. Is that … No, Glassdoor. Glass ceiling.
Ryan Klein:
Oh no, we’re smashing the glass ceiling this year.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, Glassdoor is another. Anything that’s super authoritative. And if people can comment on it, there’s user-generated content, it’s even better, right? So you might even find some ones that are oft-used, right? And add some user-generated content of your own making to it, to help boost that as well.
And then just build some … You can go to Fiverr and build crappy links to that, because it’s not going to hurt your website in the end. It’s going to hurt Yelp, right? And Yelp has probably unlimited backlink profile. I can’t even imagine the amount of backlinks that point to Yelp. It’s-
Ryan Klein:
I can’t even imagine.
Paul Warren:
You can’t even probably count it.
Ryan Klein:
Why you want to hurt Yelp?
Paul Warren:
Hate Yelp.
Ryan Klein:
[crosstalk 00:42:08] Yelp.
Paul Warren:
Anything with a Y. We’ve done a podcast on this before. If your business starts with a Y, you’re probably shit.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, right, you love Yext.
Paul Warren:
No, I-
Ryan Klein:
You just said you literally … those three account managers you have at Yext are your favorite people in the world.
Paul Warren:
I mean, they’re nice people, but as a company, I don’t love it.
Ryan Klein:
Remember, we got to bring back the fives. I mean, I’m sure that we can revise. It was Yellow Pages, it was Yext, it was Yahoo, it was Yelp, and what was-
Paul Warren:
YOLO. [crosstalk 00:42:38]. Yodle.
Ryan Klein:
Okay, I was just making sure it was still Yodle, because my God, what a bad company.
Paul Warren:
Is that even still around? I don’t think so.
Ryan Klein:
I hope it was acquired by Fine Law.
Paul Warren:
Oh, really?
Ryan Klein:
No. No, no, no. It’s-
Paul Warren:
Match made in Heaven.
Ryan Klein:
ReachLocal is the next one. You know what’s funny is, the ReachLocal reps will reach out to us, and they’ll be like, “Hey, if you ever want to refer really cheap people to us, we’re open to having that conversation.” And I’m like, “No, that’s not ethical. I’m not going to have them … ”
If they have $200, $300, $400-a-month budget, I’ll just be like, “Just put it into LSAs nowadays.” I was like, “I’m not going to have them give it to you.”
Paul Warren:
But pretty much anything with a Y, we’ve discovered, is the worst customer service, usually the worst business. So going back to powering these bad boys up. If you’re interested in doing it, a really great way of doing this is, you kind of interlink them all together, and one of the ways you can do that is with web 2.0s.
So if you don’t know what a web 2.0, you’re pretty behind in the times, and you should probably get on top of that and figure it out.
Ryan Klein:
That’s it. No help. Just the call.
Paul Warren:
Well, I just want to denigrate you on being an asshole and not knowing it. No. Think about just websites that you can website on, right? So WordPress is definitely a web 2.0, right? You can build your own, whatever your business is .wordpress.com on WordPress.
There’s tons of them out there, right? And they’re free, which is great. They can be extremely branded, exactly what your website is. You never get dinged for any of that. But it’s a great opportunity to link to all of these other citations on there for people to find you around the web.
And then you build several web 2.0s, and they all link to each other, and all the citations are on there, and everything’s linking to everything else. And it’s going to build up that authority for that location a little bit. It’s also going to give you the opportunity to build an unstructured citation with your NAP on there as well.
So the more of those you could build, really the better off that you’re going to be.
Ryan Klein:
Yeah, that pass through authority is interesting, because we do it with links all the time, and it definitely works with passing authority. But it’s also interesting because, at the end of the day, there’s that fact that citations are tied to some sort of level of authority. Keeps things interesting.
Paul Warren:
Yeah, definitely. One of the things you can also do, I didn’t really talk about because it’s not … it is a citation. It’s a really not-white-hat thing to do … is you can build maps with pinpoints in the maps with NAP info about your location. And the tool that you use that is called BatchGeo.
Used to be able to do this in Google Maps, right? You could make custom maps within Google Maps, and it would get indexed. And then Google realized that so many SEOs were doing this to affect the rankings, as we do, right? We find some exploit, and we just go all in, and it gets ruined for everyone.
So now, those maps that you make don’t get indexed on Google at all. But there are several other mapmaker websites out there that you can do this on, and they will get indexed. But most of the time, it’s a paid service. So BatchGeo is one. There’s several other ones you can check out. Hopefully, you guys learned something from this podcast today, that’ll help you in your quest to rank in Google Maps in 2020, what’s left of 2020, anyways.