Should we build citation for lifestyle blog/magazine?

[vivekrpatel]

Hello all,

I need your quick thought on citations building for the blog which is related to "women’s lifestyle magazine for all women in dentistry".

I personally believe building citations for the blog that deal with news, the magazine doesn't make a sense.

However, a client came to us and asking for citation building and website clean up.

Has anyone else gone through a similar situation?

What would be the best way to suggest them?

Would building citation work for them (or similar niche)?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Phil Rozek]

In terms of local-business directories? I wouldn't bother. Makes no sense, as you said. For one thing, there's no local intent. Nobody searches locally for anything magazine-related.

In terms of industry-specific directories? Sure.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

I agree with Phil 100%. The only thing that would be worth spending time on related to citations would be unstructured citations. So getting the blog mentioned on other publications for instance.

 

[vivekrpatel]

Thanks, Colan and Phil.

This makes sense to me.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

It's worth some time. Business mentions and the 20% of listings that allow followed links is worth it. You will gain some benefit.

I created a local business website once for a fake local concrete company, just for testing purposes, to see how it would rank. I optimized it very well onsite, much better than most competitors. The ranking was absolutely terrible. I kept it for 3-4 years just to see if it would work over time; it did not. The difference between me and these lousy local contractor websites with terrible on site SEO? Directory links. That was all. I mean, these concrete contractors were not paragons of Local SEO or anything. They weren't building quality backlinks. And the backlinks they did have from directory listings were probably incidental. ExpressUpdate/Localeze/Acxiom/Factual probably put the listings up. Even with the terrible SEO these contractors had I never even broke page 2 I don't think. Even their minimal, weak backlink profiles with purely directory links were carrying their ranking.

Business listings do work as backlinks. Therefore, they would be beneficial.

With that being said, if you had 100 items on your SEO to do list for a non-local website, business listings might be #99 or #100. There is a lot of evidence to suggest listings will still help you but there are many, many more tasks that make much more sense in terms of your time for regular SEO, as Phil and Colan alluded to. Probably even 1 quality backlink would outweigh a plethora of backlinks from directories by a factor of 5-10.

If you've done your other 98-99 SEO tasks and are twiddling your thumbs and would rather do something than nothing, go ahead. Or if you have a massive SEO budget you could outsource it. But again, there are many, many other SEO activities that warrant your time and budget's attention first.

 

[vivekrpatel]

It's worth some time. Business mentions and the 20% of listings that allow followed links is worth it. You will gain some benefit.

I created a local business website once for a fake local concrete company, just for testing purposes, to see how it would rank. I optimized it very well onsite, much better than most competitors. The ranking was absolutely terrible. I kept it for 3-4 years just to see if it would work over time; it did not. The difference between me and these lousy local contractor websites with terrible on site SEO? Directory links. That was all. I mean, these concrete contractors were not paragons of Local SEO or anything. They weren't building quality backlinks. And the backlinks they did have from directory listings were probably incidental. ExpressUpdate/Localeze/Acxiom/Factual probably put the listings up. Even with the terrible SEO these contractors had I never even broke page 2 I don't think. Even their minimal, weak backlink profiles with purely directory links were carrying their ranking.

Business listings do work as backlinks. Therefore, they would be beneficial.

With that being said, if you had 100 items on your SEO to do list for a non-local website, business listings might be #99 or #100. There is a lot of evidence to suggest listings will still help you but there are many, many more tasks that make much more sense in terms of your time for regular SEO, as Phil and Colan alluded to. Probably even 1 quality backlink would outweigh a plethora of backlinks from directories by a factor of 5-10.

If you've done your other 98-99 SEO tasks and are twiddling your thumbs and would rather do something than nothing, go ahead. Or if you have a massive SEO budget you could outsource it. But again, there are many, many other SEO activities that warrant your time and budget's attention first.

 

[vivekrpatel]

Nice explanation, Joshua.

The client has a very limited budget and doesn't want to move to content based links. So, we are trying to figure out what sort of activities we can do. Industry-specific directories are still good, but we aren't sure about the approval.

However, many thanks for your thought I really appreciate it.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Definitely wouldn't recommend it then

Good luck!

 

[gyitsakalakis]

Check out Search Quality Raters Guide for examples similar to your site. Citations (structured / unstructured) that include "reviews, references, recommendations by experts, news articles, and other credible information created/written by individuals about the website."https://static.googleusercontent.co...s/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

 

[vivekrpatel]

Check out Search Quality Raters Guide for examples similar to your site. Citations (structured / unstructured) that include "reviews, references, recommendations by experts, news articles, and other credible information created/written by individuals about the website."https://static.googleusercontent.co...s/assets/searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

Thank you for sharing this. I will definitely look into this.