City Not Listed On Certain Directories

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Folks,

When you or your team are doing citation building and you come to a business directory that doesn't list your clients city in the dropdown, how are you dealing with that?

I've heard some people say they will choose the next closest city, or the major city that it's a suburb of.

I've also heard people suggest that it's best to skip these directories as there is a risk of disrupting the NAP profile throughout the web (I tend to agree with this).

Any thoughts?

 

[Linda Buquet]

I've also heard people suggest that it's best to skip these directories as there is a risk of disrupting the NAP profile throughout the web (I tend to agree with this).

You know me Colan, I'm not really an expert on citations, but would def agree with you here, for what it's worth.

Not only could using a different city mess up NAP but it could cause Google to create a dupe.

 

[Broland]

Generally just choose the closest larger city that is available. Then if you want, add the actually city in the address line 2 field if it allows.

As far as scraping and verifying NAP data, Google uses the longest matching prefix of an address, which I think rarely, if ever, includes the city. (also why different formats of suite numbers often don't come into play). That's for textual content, the city may of course have bearing on correctly displaying a map on certain sites.

Other than that I believe it is just important as a keyword, categorization on sites, and influencing title tags etc. Could make for an interesting case study.