Simple tips to enhance your organic search rankings

Why are local citations so important to SEO?

There are many ways you can improve your websites SEO (search engine optimisation). Getting your website onto local citations is one great way to achieve this.

When a business has their website across different local citations, this tells search engines like Google and Bing that they can trust that website. This in return, increases authority of a website's domain which in result enhances their organic search rankings across the web.

What is a local citation?

A local citation is any mention online that links back to your website (backlinks linking to your website increase the authority of your websites domain).

A local citation can be a business directory such as Yellow, a blog, a news outlet such as Stuff, or an industry-specific website.

How can I get my website on to local citations?

A super simple and effective place to start is by getting your business on as many local directories as possible.

There are several local directories here in NZ, and the best thing is they're free to sign up to. I recommend you sign up to all of the following in order to enhance your websites domain authority.

1. Google My Business
2. Yellow Pages
3. Neighborly
4. Cylex
5. Apple Maps
6. Hotfrog
7. Yelp
8. Finda

How do I find out what my domain authority is?

You can use Moz's free domain analysis SEO tool to look up your domain's authority (the higher the better) and what the top linking domains are.

I suggest you check your domain's authority prior to setting up citations to your website and then again two weeks after (this gives search engines enough time to crawl the web) you have set up the citations, that way you see the improvement for yourself!

Moz's free domain analysis SEO Tool.

With Moz's domain authority tool, you can look up competitor's domain authority scores and find out what websites are linking to them. You could reach out to some of these citations in the hope to get a backlink to your website (obviously you'll need to provide a reason of value as to why they would want to link to you).

For example, if a news outlet wrote an article on a competitor, you could think of an interesting story about your business and reach out to the media company yourself in the hope they'll do a write up on your business - this isn't just great for your websites SEO but it is great for awareness of your business.