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Local Citations

What is a Local Citation?

This page was updated in May 2022.

A local citation is any online mention of partial or complete name, address, and phone number of a local business - also called NAP data. Citations can occur on local business directories, on websites and apps, and on social platforms. Citations help people to discover local businesses and can also impact local search engine rankings. Specifically, having high quality basic citations can help you rank accurately on Google’s local search interfaces. Local businesses can actively manage many citations to ensure data accuracy.

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Checking Your Local Citations

1. Manually

There are literally 100s of local citation sources you could check. Indeed, when doing a comprehensive manual audit of your citations, you could in theory check all the major citation sites by hand.

In reality, there are only a few major data aggregators that you likely would want to check. These include big players like Facebook and Apple Maps. We've included a short list of where to get citations here.

2. Automated Local Listing Checks

To make things easier, Moz offers a local listings tool for your business. You can check your local business listings across the web for both inclusions and accuracy using Moz Local’s Check Listing tool. These listings include the major data aggregators that most influence web results.

Check your local citations here:


Types of Local Citations

Mentions of your business online frequently appear without any action being taken directly by the business. Online citations can result from automated aggregation and the flow of data from local business data platforms. For example, data on a site like Data Axle can flow down to another site like YP.com. This reality of how the web works makes it especially important for local businesses to take control of the accuracy of their data, so that inaccurate data is discovered and corrected, preventing customer loss, revenue loss, and any negative impact on local search rankings.

Here is a list of the main types of local citations:

Search Engines - Google, Bing and Apple.

Primary Data Aggregators - Core platforms include Foursquare, Data Axle, and Neustar/Localeze.

Major Directories and Important Platforms - Key local business listings can also be built on popular social and review-oriented sites like Facebook and Yelp and more.

Geo/Industry-Specific Platforms - In addition to building local business listings on the major local business data platforms that serve all industries, your company can seek to build listings on websites that are specific to its unique industry and geography. Examples of these platforms would include chamber of commerce websites or the websites of professional associations and guilds.

Unstructured Citations - Supplementary citations can either be built or earned on a wide variety of publications, including blogs, news sites, apps, maps, government databases, and more. These aren't specifically structured for the publication of local business listings but still act as a reference to your business. You can either intentionally develop these citations for your business, or simply earn them based on merit and public interest/sharing of information.

Owned Properties - Your website is the most authoritative representation of your business data on the Internet.

All of the above types of citations can be developed via the use of automated software (like Moz Local), by filling out forms directly on local business platforms manually, or via other methods of PR/marketing to various platform.

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