What's Your Approach to Local Listing & Citation Building Workflow?

[Mike Wilton]

So I came across this upcoming webinar this morning from UBL, Local Business Listing Data Flow and Fixing Incorrect Listings ? Local Search Insider, and it got me thinking a lot about workflow and how people go about establishing or fixing a local search presence. So I figured I'd start up a discussion on the typical workflow other local SEO's take. Do you start at the major data provider level, the local listing level, or somewhere in between? What does your typical approach to claiming listings and building citations look like?

 

[Ashwin]

Mike,

I would break the citation workflow into three components:

1. Discovery
2. Create / Edit / Enhance
3. Claim

For #1, the best (currently available) options are to use tools like GetListed.org and maybe Whitespark to some extent.

For #2, I would just use spreadsheets to manage the work and have different fields to track whether a listing has been created, reported as incorrect or duplicate. My staff would use a collaborated Google Docs spreadsheet to get this information sorted out.

For #3, the only tricky part is sites that require phone verification where I'd need to set a time with a client, the other sites are pretty straight-forward and verify via email.

Unfortunately, there's no great tool out there to automate this workflow, the only tool that comes even close is SweetIQ, and I thought it was clunky and broken from my demo of the software. Of course, my opinion is biased because I'm two weeks away from launching a tool that will to a large extend automate the citation discovery and claim process while providing a powerful workflow for create / edit

 

[Dustybones]

We start with sites that pertain to our industry first, then cover the bigger high authority sites. We just use a spreadsheet and color code cells green (active), Red (needed), Pending (yellow). Google Docs works best for us to share.

 

[russofford]

Looks like the following post could have been inspired by this thread?

Local Citation-Building Workflow (in a Nutshell) | LocalVisibilitySystem.com

 

[Phil Rozek]

The word "workflow" was. But my impetus for writing the post was just that I often find myself explaining the rough sequence of steps. Figured I'd just commit it to paper.

 

[russofford]

Thanks Phil. I just wanted to cross-post the article url so that the thread grew a bit.

Russ