I’m subscribed to BrightLocal’s newsletter, and I think everyone should be. BrightLocal is great; they put out a fantastic newsletter, and I really like their service. WhiteSpark is probably great too, but BrightLocal just offers an unbeatable price. So I love them, and I gotta say that because I have a little bit of criticism and some thoughts on local citations, and I bet if you’re an SEO, you have some thoughts too.
BrightLocal recently sent out an article as part of their newsletter titled “How to Claim Your A Greater Town Listing.” My immediate reaction was, “What’s a Greater Town?” Is this some directory that I need to get my clients into? Have I not heard about this very important citation from some new booming website?
Investigating Greater Town’s SEO Performance Using Ahrefs
To figure out what Greater Town is doing, I went over to Ahrefs. It looks like Greater Town kind of blew up last year, but then either the August core update or the helpful content update knocked them down. Now they’re getting about 311 visits a month, which is roughly 10 visits a day to 13,246 pages. This means the average page there gets about one visit every four weeks. Most of us in the SEO community at this point think there’s not really any sense in having a citation from a website that doesn’t get any visits.
Understanding Bias in SEO Tools and Their Impact on Local Citations
BrightLocal is great software, but why would they want us to care about having a listing in Greater Town? Well, because they provide the service, right? They’re inherently biased, and I really do think that BrightLocal means well and does everything to help their customers, but it’s undeniable—they have a bias. We all have biases. They’re invisible most of the time. They have reasons for wanting us to think that local citations really matter.
Do Local Citations Still Matter for SEO in 2024?
Of course, local citations matter, right? Everyone in local SEO knows that citations matter. We build citations for our clients; it’s just what you do when you do local SEO. But personally, I’ve been doing this for 14 years now. I’ve yet to see any definitive proof. We put out the citations, but I’ve never seen the bump up. You’d think after doing this for hundreds of clients, we’d occasionally be like, “Aha! There was the ranking boost from the citations!” We did the citations, we got the ranking boost. But we haven’t seen it.
So I started doing a little more digging to see what information is out there. Fortunately, Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky put out a video just a few weeks ago. Sterling Sky does some great content—some of the best in local SEO, in my opinion. Subscribe to their newsletter too; they have great stuff. Joy’s video discussed whether citations still matter in 2024. They say, “Hey, there was this study done. They still matter in 2024,” according to the video. That was great news, and I couldn’t wait to learn more about this study.
Reviewing Uberall’s Study on Local Citations and SEO
Well, I found it. The only study that they could have been talking about is this one from Uberall. I looked for the stats, and this is what I found: the same stats from a study written in 2021, with data from 2019 to 2020. And guess what? Uberall sells citations. They point out that you might expect a company offering listing management as a key product to be biased in favor of local listings. I haven’t found any new data since this period.
Community Insights: Do Local Citations Improve Search Rankings?
I did some quick Googling and found some interesting insights. Quora had a great answer from on why local listings matter. PRM4U also provided some great information, definitely not generated by ChatGPT, on what local listings can offer. They also offer a comprehensive suite of services to boost your online presence. Other sources, presumably using the same ChatGPT prompt, offer similar responses. Quora is just the top-ranking post, because of course it is.
BrightLocal and Moz will tell you why citations matter, and many other websites offer local citation services. However, Search Engine Journal stands out because they don’t sell citations. I trust Search Engine Journal. Miranda Miller, in particular, seems to know her stuff. She talks about evidence for citations as a ranking factor, but this evidence often dates back to 2020, 2018, and 2016. Most of this evidence relies on respondents saying that citation accuracy is important for local search rankings.
Practical Tips for Using Affordable Citation Services Like BrightLocal
The bottom line is, I don’t know if citations work. BrightLocal makes it so easy and cheap to buy citations that when we get a new client, I’m going to pay them $50 to put out citations on the top 25 websites. It’s probably doing nothing, but it costs just $50, and that client will pay us tens of thousands of dollars over the campaign’s lifecycle. If there’s a small chance, even a 5% chance, that this will move the needle 10%, it’s worth the $50.
Until we see definitive proof that it doesn’t work, you might as well use a service like BrightLocal. I would not recommend using services like Yext or others that charge hundreds of dollars every year for minimal returns. If you need to update a listing, you can just buy another $2 submission through Bright Local. My guess is these services are probably doing nothing or next to nothing, and I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.
Google’s Official Position on Local Citations and Directory Listings
In her article, Miller points out that Google emphasizes the importance of having accurate information online, but they only say this about Google Business Profile. I did some digging and couldn’t find Google saying anything about the importance of being listed in other directories. Miller concludes that it’s all but confirmed by Google that they use local citations, but I couldn’t find any evidence to support this. They only talk about their own listing.
Why would Google care if your information is in directories that no one uses? It’s free to spam these directories. There was probably a time when Google relied on this information, but if a directory is hardly indexed by Google and doesn’t receive traffic, I can’t imagine why Google would care that your business is listed there with the same address and phone number.
That’s my hot take. I’m skeptical about the true impact of local citations. Let me know what you think and tell me why I’m wrong. Thanks.
