One of the most important aspects of local SEO is building high quality citations and there are some UK usual suspects but sooner or later you will get to the point where you need to take a look at what your top competitors are doing so you can further refine your approach.

To do this we can use some advanced search queries (that are really pretty simple) and find out what structured and unstructured citations the top players are using and importantly what they are doing with them.

Once people have understood what a citation is in relation to local SEO then the next question we hear is ‘what are the best UK citation sites?’.

Well, if you Google around you will find plenty of folks giving their opinions but the fact of the matter is that Google removed visibility of external citations from Google Places listings in June 2011 so no one (outside of Google) knows which citations are best for Local SEO in the UK or anywhere else for that matter.

Matt Cutts, the spam tzar from Google has just released a new video detailing what webmasters can look forward to in the world of SEO in the coming months.

Unsurprisingly, a large part of this is the continued crackdown on low quality and manipulative SEO practices intended to artificially inflate a sites position and visibility in Google search and a push to drive quality of results ever upwards – as that is what keeps us all using Google right? 

If there is one fundamental mistake that people make with SEO, and this is extends from lone rangers to business owners right through to SEO agencies it is always concentrating on volume. More (crappy) links, more (crappy) citations, more (crappy) content. More, more, more is better, better, better – right?

Well, you know, bigger is not always better (or so I tell my wife) and quantity is not going to win out over quality in more competitive spaces. I have seen estimates that total citations accounts for around 25% of the local rank so whilst they are certainly important, getting them right and concentrating on that quality is also an equally important and often overlooked factor where you can get a leg up on the competition.

Local SEO is not difficult but it does require that you pay attention to the details and getting your name, address and phone number (NAP) correctly formatted and consistent across all of your citations is one of the areas where you really do have to pay attention to detail.

There are plenty of posts out there about how to do this for a US business but not so many for those of us in the UK so rest of this post will take a quick look at first getting your NAP correctly formatted.

In our previous post we took a look at what citations are and how they are important for SEO, today we are looking at the main different types of citations that you can use to help raise the visibility of your site in the local and organic search results.

Not all Citations are Created Equal

To very quickly recap a citation is the mentioning of a businesses name in close proximity to it’s address and phone number (and ideally website URL). This is known as the NAP – Name, Address & Phone number (not the nice kind where you doze off with a book after a big lunch).

One of the questions we are most commonly asked at Bowler Hat is what is a citation, how does that work for SEO and more importantly how does that help local and small businesses improve their traffic from search engines?

What is a citation?

In simple terms a citation is a mention of your business name on another website. Citations may include a link to your website but that is in no way essential. Surprisingly, given the confusion, that is pretty much all there is to it.

As a gigging SEO I see a lot of sites and get the chance to dig into their background, history and see just exactly what they have been doing for their ‘SEO’. And, in many cases, I hear from a lot of folks who have lost most of their traffic due to one of the recent Google Penalties.

So, when it comes to tactics people have employed (or purchased) to help rank their sites, well, little surprises me any longer and this week, we saw another big brand in Interlflora punished for taking their spammy SEO practices one step to far.

In my experience, a fairly common approach (excuse?) is seeing what your competitor has been doing and copying their spammy tactics in an effort to outrank or compete with them. This approach is crappy at best, and if you copy site A, then someone soon copies you, and so on and you just end up dropping more spam to win the spam war. Ultimately, this has led to a web that is littered with content, links and entire sites that exist solely for SEO purposes – not cool. 

If you have PDF versions of articles on your site there is always a chance that they may get indexed and flagged as being duplicates and therefore impact upon the ability for either the parent page or the PDF to rank.

Additionally, PDFs generally make for poor landing pages and should a user arrive at a PDF page on your site there is no branding, no navigation and no way for them to consume any more of your content or do pretty much anything other than click back to the search results – not a good thing.

Further still, links could end up pointing at the PDF lessening the ability of the main page to rank for it’s chosen terms, serving up the PDF in it’s place or just wasting link equity that should rightfully be allocated to the HTML version of the article.

All in all, these problems can cause a loss of deserved traffic to your hard built and spectacular content so this is a problem. Fortunately, it is a problem with a simple solution.

It would seem that for many folks, when they think about SEO, they think link building. Problem is, link building, or links at least, whilst still important, should be the very last thing you think about when you are looking to improve your  traffic from organic search results.

Now, I am not talking about those first few links you can use to get started. A few highly relevant and quality directories, maybe a few high quality guest posts  and even a few small articles here and there (if the quality is right and we are talking 1 or 2 on each site). We are talking about the long term, scalable link building that you will be doing in an effort to ‘promote’ your site in the search results.