TOP Citation Source Website Types

[sergiuliano]

Hi,


I would need your help to arrange a TOP with the most important website types where Local Citations can be built.

I have identified the following types and created a TOP the way they were listed on Google when running the reverse engineering algorithm for discovering the Citation Sources:


1) Local Individual Industry Business Directories ( nysba . org )
2) Local Generic Business Directories ( ex locchicago . com )
3) Generic Business Directories ( as Yelp, WhitePages, Yahoo local, Forsquare )
4) Generic Individual Industry Business Directories ( tripadvisor, lawyer-map . com )
5) Company Directories ( ex bbb.org )
6) Video/Image Sharing Platforms ( YouTube, Vimeo etc )
7) Social Media Platforms ( Facebook )
8) Reverse Phone Number Lookup ( phoneauditor . net, whycall . me )
9) Forums / Blogs / News ( PrWebs etc )
10) Whois / SeoRank ( godaddy whois, woorank etc )
11) Local Deals ( GroupOn etc )

For building this TOP I have analyzed high CPC keywords on different industries by running Google search queries with Local IP addresses in order to get 100% accurate results.

I have used on each report implicit keywords like "law office", "pizza delivery", "car rentals" and no explicit keywords like "law office miami", "pizza delivery chicago" etc. The reason for generating the report on implicit keywords is described in the next post. This is a very important step as it seems that most of the other researches were built on "explicit keywords" only

http://localsearchforum.catalystema...ot-local-new-google-keyword-planner-kw-3.html

The results I got are different than the ones listed on

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/local-citations-by-category.html

which probably used a more generic approach and probably the reports were generated on explicit keywords. This should be the reason why they rank on 1st position the Generic Business Directories which is only on position 3 on my report.

What is your opinion? Which Citation Source Type has the highest Local SEO Authority?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@sergiuliano

Thanks for sharing this. My experience has been that different types of citations *generally* serve different functions. Without being listed (accurately and consistently) on the horizontal directories (e.g. Yelp, YP, CitySearch) you?re unlikely to rank well. Meanwhile, although the industry-specific and region-specific sites may not have the same influence over your NAP consistency, being listed on them can help you pull ahead of your neck-and-neck competitors. Both important, but functionally a little different.

 

[sergiuliano]

@Phil

Thats right, the industry is a very important factor when identifying the citation sources.

For restaurants, hotels, spa centers etc - generic directories are mandatory.

In the analysis I have completed I have used High CPC law-related keywords, with a high competition level, where generic sources does not help so much.

On high competition level, the Local Industry Citation Sources seems to bring the highest Authority level.