Darren Shaw_SearchLove San Diego_Audit and fix citations for Local Search gains

Editor's Notes

• #5: Mention how the website association is important as well. NAPW
• #7: David Mihm did a great whiteboard Friday a while back that explained how business listings are generated at Google. They gather business data from many different sources including government, major data aggregators, community edits in Map Maker, the business owner, and the rest of the web. It turns out that businesses change their name, address, phone number, and domains surprisingly often. Any business older than 10 years is likely to have some kind of old messy data out there. When a business owner has a problem with their listing at Google, they’ll often go straight to Google and make the change, but eventually the problem resurfaces because Google keeps pulling in incorrect data from all these different sources. The business owner assumes they must be the most trusted source of information about their own business, but when Google is receiving different information from a number of other trustworthy sources, they’ll trust that it must be the most correct data. This is why it’s so important to make sure you clean up your citations at the major data sources and around the rest of the web. David did a great whiteboard FridayGoogle is collecting business data from all these sourcesBusinesses change their name, address, and phone number surprisingly oftenBusiness owner tries to fix, but it resurfacesThis is why it’s so important to clean up data at major sources and the rest of the web
• #8: We see the same kind of thing when we look at how Infogroup, one of the most important aggregators of business data, compiles its database of business listings. Infogroup is gathering business data from government business registries, public company filings, point of interest databases, national change of address records, direct submissions from the businesses, telco and utilities, yellow pages, and from the web. They then combine, standardize, and sort out what is the correct and current business information. They even manually phone each business to verify that they have the correct data. This diligent verification process makes Inforgroup’s data the most trusted in the industry and Google accepts a direct feed from them.
• #9: Looking at the latest version of David’s famous Local Search Ranking Factors, we see that local search experts agree that consistency of structured citations is one of the most important details to take care of. It’s #3 on the list with only proper category association and actually being located in the city being more important.
• #10: You know how you can split your link equity by not 301ing the www and non-www version of your website? In this example we see that there are 28 linking root domains to the non-www version of whitespark.ca that we can consolidate by a 301 or canonical directive.
• #11: Well, the same thing happens with citations. If we think of your listing at Google like your website, and you have all these mentions pointing to the listings, but there are some other mentions that seem to be pointing to a different business, then you won’t be getting credit for those listings.
• #12: Unfortunately, there is no 301 or canonical directive for citations. The only way to recover that “credit” is to find these incorrect listings and update them with your current NAP info. More mentions = better local rankings.
• #13: If you have enough of these incorrect citations then Google might think there is a different business and create a new listing for it. Sometimes even a minor difference in the way the business name is formatted can be enough to create a duplicate if Google is getting that NAP variation from enough trusted sources.
• #14: These duplicates can seriously dampen your ability to rank in the local results. Local experts list this as the 5th most harmful negative ranking factor in the local search ranking factors.
• #15: A common mistake many business owners make is to just go out and create new listings on all the citation sites. This will leave your old conflicting citation data lying around the local search ecosystem for Google and other data aggregators to pick up.
• #16: Instead, you should find the incorrect listings and update them with your current and correct business info.
• #18: We’ve done a few citation clean up jobs at Whitespark, but we’ve always done it in combination with a ton of other local search optimization work, so while we’re confident the citation clean up work had a positive impact, it’s difficult to attribute the ranking increases to only the clean up. This post by John Denny is one of the few I have found on the benefits of doing the citation audit and clean up work. John Denny worked through the process for one of his clients that had moved multiple times and changed their phone number multiple times. After cleaning everything up, his client went from nowhere to in the local search results to top positions for many of their keywords.
• #19: Mary Bowling presented a great case study at SMX West 2012. She gave me this quote on the benefits.
• #20: Adam Steele has done a lot of citation audit and clean up work, and he had this to say about one recent job they completed.
• #21: Hopefully you now understand the problem better and see the benefits of doing the cleanup work, so let’s show you how to do it!
• #22: Before you begin, collect as much info as you can about their current and past business information.
• #23: The best place to start is to ask the business owner directly. They’ll know about their past history of different business names, moves, and phone number changes. So ask them about any old business names they may have used in the past, any corporate business names with things like LLC, Inc, LLP, etc.
• #24: Ask them if they’ve ever moved locations or had satellite locations at different addresses.
• #25: Ask them about any old phone numbers they may have used. Any current or old toll-free numbers? Any mobile numbers? Call tracking numbers? Even fax numbers can show up as the primary number on many listings so ask about any old or current fax numbers they may have used.
• #26: The website URL listed on your citations is an important link that Google and other data aggregators can use to associate your business listings with your business. A link to an old domain can throw this off. Ask about any previous or current domains used for the business.
• #27: Many business have other associated business that could mess with their NAP info if they share addresses or phone numbers. Ask them about official corporate companies, holding companies, sister companies, partnerships, etc.
• #28: Many businesses will have already claimed their profiles on some of the major citation sources like Yelp, Localeze, Foursquare, Yellowpages.com, etc. Ask them if they have any login data. Also ask them if they have a Yext account. I’ll talk about Yext later.
• #29: We developed a super handy questionnaire you can ask the business to complete. I’ll give you a link to download this at the end of the talk. Send it to them to complete before you start on any citation audit or clean up work.
• #30: Ok, so you got your questionnaire back from the business and you think you’re ready to start hunting down and cleaning up bad citations. Not so fast. I’ve rarely seen a business provide a complete history of business information. They either don’t know about previous versions of their NAP or they forgot, or they didn’t realize there was a call tracking number setup on their yellowpages listing, or some other thing. You can take what they provide as a great head start and now search out all the NAP variations in use in the local search ecosystem.
• #31: As you start looking for NAP variations you’re going to find a lot of listings and you may be inclined to start recording them all in a spreadsheet as you come across them. Don’t do that just yet as I’ll be showing you a process for this later on. In step 2 we just want to find and record any variations of the NAP we find.
• #32: So here’s the first NAP variation. Their current and correct business info.
• #33: Now run a query thatexcludes their current phone number and toll-free number. Exclude any active numbers they use to see what other numbers you can find that are being used on listings.
• #34: RossHudgens showed us a great plugin at MozCon that will allow you to quickly open links from the search result in new tabs. Install LinkClump on Chrome or Multi Links on Firefox, then you can just right click and drag to select the links and when you release they’ll open in new tabs. This will help you review listings a bit quicker.
• #35: Here’s a listing on an assisted living lead gen site that is associating their own phone number with every listing so they can track the leads they send the business. This particular business has a ton of these.
• #36: And here’s a listing I found with a different phone number and address. It turns out that this is the corporate office for the business.
• #37: As you discover different numbers, exclude each of them from the query to refine your results. Continue running searches like this and you’ll drill down to more and more variations.
• #38: Now we can look for listings that are using the correct phone number, but have a different address (or no address).
• #39: Oh look here. I just discovered an old address that this business used to operate at.
• #40: Like you did with phone numbers, continue running new searches that also exclude the additional addresses you find to refine your results.
• #41: Next, we want to find listings that are using the primary phone number but have a different business name.
• #42: Woah. What the heck is Sound Health Management? It’s at the same address and phone number as the main business. I asked the business about it turns out it’s some company that was never really in operation, but I guess it was registered as a business at one point in the past and that info made its way onto the internet.
• #43: Again, exclude what you find to keep drilling down.
• #44: And here’s one more I found. This is the hair salon that operates within the main business. It’s not too unusual for businesses to share an address, but they really should have a unique phone number to help differentiate the two businesses.These queries aren’t an exhaustive list of the discovery search queries. Depending on what you get back from your client questionnaire, you’ll likely need to run some additional queries to find all the NAP variations, but this should give you a good idea of the process you want to follow.
• #45: Record all the variations you find in a spreadsheet. I’ll share a link to our template at the end of the talk.
• #46: Ok, so now that you have a complete list of all the NAP variations out there, look through the and determine which ones are problems, and which ones aren’t.
• #47: Don’t worry about minor address and phone number variations. Many sites format this info differently and Google will understand your address just fine. With regards to the business name, most variations are definitely a problem, but something like “The” at the beginning of it are not cause for concern. Differences such as LLP, INC, and LLC at the end of the name *CAN* cause problems though.
• #48: Google actually normalizes all the addresses they find on the web. This tool uses the Google Maps API which is presumably what Google uses for its address normalization, so if you run an address variation through this tool and it “resolves” to the correct address, you can be confident that Google understands that address and will associate it with your listing.
• #50: Ok, now that you know what matters and what doesn’t, go through your NAP list and mark the problems. This businesses official corporation has a different name, address, and phone number. I don’t want to go around the web removing those listings. They won’t conflict with the main NAP.
• #51: Before you begin digging through the web cleaning up citations all willy-nilly, start with those super important listings that get distributed all over the web.
• #52: You don’t want to start with the individual citation sites. Here’s a common scenario of what happens when you do that. You edit this listing…
• #53: But they get a feed of business listing data from Localeze once a month…
• #54: And in a couple months your incorrect listing pops back up on the site. So, you’ll of course want to clean up Localeze before you clean up this site, but…
• #55: …even the data aggregators like localeze are getting data from other sources. You must start at the true sources and work your way up the ecosystem.
• #60: Ok, now that you’ve sorted out those scary “official” sources, next on your list is Infogroup because they feed directly into Google. Go to expressupdate.com and use your NAP list to search for all possible variations of the old and current business info. Claim and update accurate listings, claim and remove old inaccurate ones.
• #61: They’ll phone verify any claims you make, so before you work through this process make sure you have cordinated a time with the business to do this work. I have simply scheduled a time with the business to work through phone verify listings. I queue them all up, press the call me buttons, and then they send me a text with the pin. Works pretty good!
• #62: This is super important. Use this opportunity to enhance all your existing listings as much as possible. A bunch of them are going to have just the listings you find are just going to have the basics of name, address, and phone number. Improve your relevancy by adding categories, detailed descriptions, and keywords to the listings. Add hours and payments types too. If they give you a field for it, add it! Collect all the info you need from the business ahead of time. You can use the intake form we use on our citation building service.
• #63: Localeze has the largest distribution of all the data aggregators. Probably because licensing their data is 10 times cheaper than Infogroup. So, it’s super important to make sure they only have correct listings here. Search for all variations of your NAP info, claim and enhance the correct listings, and remove any incorrect listings.
• #64: #3 on my list of super important data aggregators, make sure your data is correct at Acxiom as well. Go to this simple and easy to type domain mybusinesslistingmanager.myacxiom.com, search for any listings, claim and enhance the correct ones, then delete the bad ones.
• #65: Go to each of these URLs, search for your listings, claim and enhance, remove bad listings. You know the drill by now. They all phone verify.
• #66: This is another one of those semi-official sources. They get fed to a lot of company registration type sites and they tend to have plenty of out of date listings. Clean em up!
• #69: A lot of these super important sources are queried in the excellent GetListed tool. It’s a great place to start. Just enter all the Nap variations and see what they come up with. Also, it’s free! Here’s a run through of all the great information you can pull from it.Listing scoreImportant site you’re not listed onListings that haven’t been claimed as well as how comprehensive those listings areThey’ll even find some duplicates!They sometimes report this “we were unable to contact this site” thing, but if you try again in a few minutes, you can sometimes see the result.Anyway, it’s a great tool that can tell you a lot about where you stand on some of the most important sites on the web. Use it.
• #71: While I think that Yext can be great for some purposes, I do NOT think it’s a good citation clean up tool. It’s great for… but there are some problems when you consider it for citation clean up. Namely…
• #72: Phew! If you cleaned up all of those important sources, you’re about 60% of the way there with this task. Unfortunately, the remaining 40% is going to be more work. I’ll try to make it hurt as little as possible…
• #73: Many of you are familiar with the horrifically complicated plate of spaghetti right here. The funny thing is, there are still a ton of other sites out there that don’t even make it onto this chart. The local search ecosystem is BIG and Google’s scraping the bejesus out of all of it.
• #74: What you want to do is search Google for all different variations of your NAP. That second one in green is for their corporate address, and it’s not in conflict with the main business since it has a different name, address, and phone, so I’m just going to exclude it. Note the comments field where I have noted the problems with each particular NAP.
• #75: Now you’re going to search for all possible variations you can think of. Be exhaustive with this.
• #76: Look at every result, determine if it’s a listing or something you don’t need to worry about, and record all of listings you find in a spreadsheet. Hmmm… Google indexes a LOT of pages though. This is going to take FOREVER. I know what you may be thinking here…
• #78: Fortunately, there is a better way.
• #79: You can drop all those queries into a single custom report on the Link Prospector!
• #80: Set the depth to 1000 so it paginates through Google’s results like nobody’s business…
• #81: Add out list of crap reverse phone lookup sites to the exclusions (I’ll give you a link to these later)
• #82: And also, add these “duplicate finder” queries I came up with. The idea with these queries is that most citation sources will put the business name in the title of the actual listings. So, if you do a site: search on the domain and add intitle:”business_name” you’re going to get results that are just the listings and not all the index pages and sub pages of the site that also have the NAP info on them. Now, we just need a really good list of common citation sites, and thanks to Phil Rozek, we have one. He has vetted this list pretty well to include only sites that are free and that provide proper name, address, phone fields. No “link directories”! I have a template you can use with the full list of 183 sites. Just search and replace business_name with your business name, then paste it in.Ok, once you have that all set up, press the submit button.
• #83: If the queue is empty you’ll get your report in about 5 to 10 minutes. If it’s busy, it could take up to an hour. Whatever, you’re saving yourself dozens or maybe hundreds of hours.
• #84: When it’s done, BEHOLD the glory of your citation audit research. You now have a beautiful list of possible citations that has duplicates removed, is grouped by domain, can be sorted by PR and Moz domain authority, and that has the titles and descriptions. You can export this to CSV, or work directly from the web app and use LinkClump to open URLs.
• #85: Unfortunately, someone (likely an intern or outsourcer) will still need to look through each result in the link prospector list and sort the real listings from the junk. Record all the listings you find in a spreadsheet, and I’ve got a template for you for that as well.
• #86: Finally, once you’ve created your list of correct and incorrect citations, you can start the clean up process. The “Audit” portion is done.
• #87: You’re going to go to each site and look for things like…
• #88: Often, some quick Google queries can help you find the update and delete information.
• #89: Many sites aren’t going to have a simple web based form for making changes though, and in these cases you’ll want to contact the site to request updates or removal. Adam Steele included a great outreach template in his post on citation audits. We use a variation of this.
• #90: It’s really important that you make contact from an email address on the main domain of the business. If you don’t, they will have no way of knowing if you’re legit or if you’re a competitor trying to sabotage their listings. Your requests will either get rejected, or more likely, ignored.
• #91: Now, finally, after you have cleaned up all the data sources that Google is pulling from, go to Google and make your changes. Don’t be that poor business owner from David’s whiteboard Friday that keeps spinning his wheels making changes that don’t stick. You’ve done your work and now all the info Google’s getting will agree.
• #92: Go to Google maps and search for your NAP variations.
• #93: Go search at Map Maker too.
• #94: If you find any problems, claim the listings into to your Google Places For Business dashboard and try to change them. If the changes don’t stick, try making the changes through Map Maker. Your edits will go to a moderator who will approve the change. I haven’t had a problem yet getting legitimate changes approved. Once approved, they should be reflected in your listings on Maps within a day or two.
• #95: Did you know you can get Google Places support on the phone now? You enter your info in this form, click submit, and they call you. You’ll be talking to real human with power to fix your problems in minutes. Holy shit. It’s pretty much amazing. When I get them on the phone I like to open with “how do I rank #1 on Google” just for funsies.
• #96: Bing’s Places for Business is pretty darn good. Find your listings, claim them, update the good ones, and remove the bad ones. Getting listed here is a pretty easy win since most of the local competition is probably ignoring Bing.
• #98: In closing, I’d like to leave you with some assets to make your citation audit and clean up work easier. Visit this link and get: … Please don’t share these resources with anyone yet as I’ll be publishing them next week and would be sad if they got leaked in advance. This is some exclusive early access just for you fine folks.
• #99: Oh, and we’ve been compiling information on how to add, update, and delete listings on the full list of 183 citation sources listed on Phil Rozek’s definitive list. You can have that too! Again, pretty please, no sharing until I publish all this, and after that, yeah, the more sharing the better!