Top Local Citations Sources for U.S. Businesses

In the last couple of months, we’ve seen a number of changes in the local search space, but the more important one of course is the birth of Google+ Local. In the midst of all that, we could only scent that there was something good cooking in the local search kitchen. Just announced yesterday was a study on the best citation sources by U.S. city.

Notably, David Mihm and Darren Shaw of getlisted.org and whitespark published a study to teach others where to best invest your buck on local citation sources. For those who are not up to speed, citations are mentions of your business information (name, address and phone number, also called NAP) on business directories, and extremely important in local search optimization.

The methodology of this study was:

Using Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder, we searched Google for the most common keywords within 71 local search categories across 53 large US cities, 20 medium-sized cities, and 20 smaller cities. We then scored the sites inversely based on ranking position combined with overall number of occurrences. The sites that appeared most often and with the highest rankings were deemed “best.”

As keen as I was, I was interested in seeing the bigger picture with all 93 cities combined and this is what I got for the top 10:

Citation Source	Mentions
Yellow Pages	93
Superpages	93
Facebook	93
Yelp	92
Yahoo Local	91
Citysearch	86
Manta	81
BBB	39
Service Magic	32
Dex Knows	31

There’s no denying that Yellow Pages, Superpages and Facebook are amongst the top citations you absolutely need. Don’t let this list be your only list of citation sources. You’ll need to built it out over time but this study will give you a good starting point for where you need to go.

I recommend reviewing the study for yourself to get the full story.

I would like to thank the team at getlisted.org and whitespark for putting this study together and provided this great list of citations sources. I ponder whether there will be a study similar to this coming for Canada. David? Darren? 🙂

Jackson Lo

Jackson Lo is an SEO & Social Media Consultant at Cardinal Path. His specialty lies in SEO, Local Search, and Social Media. Over the course of the past year, his involvement in the analytics space has made him more proficient in identifying actionable insights to help clients understand how their efforts in SEO are contributing to their overall online success. Jackson enjoys competitive volleyball, photography, arts and food.