A citation is any mention of your business details somewhere other than your own website. Some are structured: a directory listing with fields for name, address and phone. Others are unstructured: a sentence in a local news story, a line on a chamber member page, your name on a sponsor list. Google uses both to work out whether you are a real business and where you operate.
Briefly explained
- Any mention of your name, address and phone off your own site counts.
- A link is not required. The mention itself does the work.
- They feed prominence, which is one of the three things local ranking runs on.
- Accuracy beats volume. Two hundred scraped listings do less than a dozen correct ones.
What counts as a citation?
There are two kinds, and both carry weight.
- Structured: A listing with fields — Yelp, Angi, BBB, Apple Business Connect, a trade association directory, a manufacturer’s dealer locator.
- Unstructured: An ordinary mention in running text. A local paper writing about your work, a neighborhood association thanking you, a supplier naming you on a project page.
The unstructured kind is the one most businesses never think about, and it is often the more valuable of the two, because nobody can buy it in bulk.
Which ones actually matter?
The sources a real business like yours would appear in anyway.
- The data aggregators, because they feed dozens of smaller sites you will never visit.
- The platforms your customers actually search, which differ by industry.
- Your licensing board or professional register, where one exists.
- Local institutions: the chamber, the neighborhood association, the teams and events you sponsor.
A directory nobody reads, with no editorial standard and no traffic, does nothing for you. Neither does the same listing repeated across forty mirror sites owned by one company.
How do you build them?
In this order, because the first step makes the rest safe.
- Decide the exact format for your name, address and phone, and write it down. See NAP consistency.
- Claim and correct the aggregators and the big platforms first.
- Add the sources specific to your industry — the register, the association, the supplier locator.
- Add the local ones. These take real-world contact rather than a form.
- Record where you are listed, so the next person who corrects an address knows where to go.
What do the terms mean?
- Structured citation: A directory listing with named fields.
- Unstructured citation: A mention in ordinary text, with no fields.
- Data aggregator: A company that distributes business records to many smaller directories at once.
- Prominence: How established your business looks across the web. Citations are one input to it, alongside reviews and links.
- Duplicate listing: The same business recorded twice on one platform, usually from an old address or an auto-created entry.
When is the work finished?
Sooner than most agencies will tell you. Citation building is a finite job. Once the real sources are covered and correct, more listings add close to nothing, and the time is better spent on reviews and on pages for the places you want work in.
What is not finished is the maintenance. A move, a new number or a rebrand puts every one of those records out of date at the same moment.
Owner questions
