Consumer citations have become more and more prominent everywhere we look online, and for good reason too! The presence and reliability of the human touch mixed with professionalism does wonders in potentially drawing in conversions. But are they really the new future of which local SEO practices are leaning towards? Today, we discuss the trend here.
Consumer citations typically refer to direct mentions of specific corporations or brands on online platforms/channels. For example: Online reviews of products, comments about corporation services or official published comments on community blogs and the like can all be considered consumer citations. As of 2017, search engine crawlers are improved so that they are able to recognise and automatically index citations- the more reliable and influential your presence is, the higher your chances of enhancing your search engine result ranking becomes. This ensures that consumers who are like-minded to individuals who have published comments or reviews on your pages will be more likely to notice and access your content.
Apart from SEO search engine ranking improvements, consumer citations also act as a form of conversational marketing through social media platforms/channels and user generated content websites. Potential online customers are more willing to engage in the services of local businesses when there are reliable, trustworthy, online reviews from customers displayed somewhere accessible. This not only strengthens customer relations, it also encourages further and repeat conversions!
Local SEO citations are also used to provide interested customers with consistency and essential information- like a navigation of sorts. This is useful since customers are most likely to make use of businesses who have consistent local SEO citations across all of their online platforms. Consumer citations are also effective as an added edge over other website competitors, especially when the both of your websites are closely matched, since they help search engines determine the website’s exact value.
The benefits consumer citations carry to online internet presence as well as SEO is evident. While this new calculation algorithm still has ways to go in terms of improvement, there is no denying that consumer citations are contributing quite a bit to the health of your overall SEO strategy. If you have not begun exploring it’s benefits, it is high time to give it a try!
