Fixing/Building Local Citations - The Options...

[Deke]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking for some advice and insights with a particular local SEO problem I am facing...

I am a marketing consultant for a local law firm that has one office location. I have investigated their currently listed citations using Whitesparks Citation Finder tool and have discovered some pretty glaring errors/problems with their NAP's. Beyond some egregious company name misspellings and wrong phone numbers, a previous SEO consultant also built citations (for this same law firm) for about 10 virtual office locations (which are no longer in use, but citations still exist).

Long story short, they have a cacophony of incorrect citations, duplicate citations and outdated NAPs that need removed ASAP.

I know there are many services that can help fix such citation problems, such as YEXT, Moz Local, Whitespark, BrightLocal, etc. However, I have never used any of these and they all seem to have their advantages and disadvantages. Further, some SEO's in my situation might consider trying to fix the citation problems manually themselves, which can ensure accuracy and ownership of citations, but at the expense of speed and convenience.

So I am seeking any guidance and insights anyone may be able to offer as to what might be a best path to take. Please don't be afraid to recommend particular products or services either.

Thank you for any help and advice, and know any you give will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Scott Rawlins]

Deke,

I know they are many here that can help provide useful info about your situation. But I wanted to let you know that I moved your post over to the Citations section to help get you more feedback.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Deke,

We moved this from General Local Search to the Citations Forum, so it will get more attention from the Pros here that specialize more in citations.

 

[Nyagoslav]

Hi Deke,

Obviously as part of Whitespark I would be biased toward our service (Citation Audit and Clean-up). However, here are some general notes and Q&As that might help in your decision making. Of course all the decision making should also be made on case-by-case basis, but I will base my notes on the case(s) you described in your original post.

1. Will each of these services take care of all of your duplicate listings, or listings that feature incorrect, outdated, or fake information that should be removed?

Both Moz Local and Yext are uni-linear, automation-based systems. This means that they will, in general, find and fix one listing per website (with the note that they cover only the websites that are part of their networks). They offer different types of add-ons that could deal with duplicates, but additional manual work on your end would be required, i.e. you would need to help them find the duplicates. I have personally had negative experience specifically with the duplicate suppression process of Yext. A few of our clients have had active Yext subscriptions at the time they signed up for our citation clean-up or general local SEO services. That is why I seeked the help of Yext's support to try and get rid of some of the duplicate listings on the sites that are part of their network (note: some of the subscriptions had been active for more than 2 years, but there were still tens of duplicate listings on the sites part of Yext's network). Unfortunately, in almost all of the cases I had absolutely no success going through Yext's support and that is why I did the duplicate clean-ups manually.

2. Will each of these services cover all of the important bases that would need to be covered in terms of citation auditing and clean-up?

The important bases could tentatively be divided in the following categories:
- Data aggregators (ExpressUpdate, Acxiom, Localeze, Factual)
- Important top-level search platforms (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Apple Maps)
- Most important citation sources (the likes of YP, Yelp, Citysearch, Superpages)
- Most important secondary citation sources (the likes of MerchantCircle, MojoPages, Kudzu)

Yext cover:
- Factual + they do have some relationship with ExpressUpdate, but as far as I understand it is available only for some users
- Bing + Yahoo
- Some of the most important citation sources
- Some of the most important secondary citation sources

Moz Local cover:
- All the data aggregators
- Google + Bing + Yahoo
- Some of the most important citation sources
- Basically none of the secondary citation sources

Our service covers:
- All the data aggregators
- All the important top-level search platforms
- All the most important citation sources (except for WhitePages and their network, which is monopolized by Yext)
- All the most important secondary citation sources

3. What is the cost and sustainability of the service?

Moz Local: $84/year
Yext: $500 to $1,000/year
Our service: $750 (one time)

I have previously done a case study on what happens when one cancels their Yext subscription. You could find it here.

4. What would be your time involvement and time until work is done?

With Yext, the information should be distributed instantly or near-instantly across their network. With Moz Local, as far as I know, it takes a few hours. With our service it takes about 1 month, as it is a manual process.

It would take you approximately 15 minutes to get set up on Yext or Moz Local. Your involvement would be about 30 minutes overall with our service.

I hope this helps!

Nyagoslav

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks so much for the detailed info Nyagoslav!