My Local SEO Philosophy

II. Local SEO in 2022 ≠ Citations. Traditional Citations Are Irrelevant.

Though Mike and I discussed this topic at length in our StreetBytes column over the past couple of years, the extent to which our thoughts from a decade (or longer) ago still mis-inform SEOs today frustrates both of us. Without speaking for Mike, here are my current thoughts about citations, as clearly and plainly as possible.

Local search has, quite simply, changed in the last 10 years. And I don’t just mean on the SEO side, but on the consumer side as well.

In the early pre-mobile days, the landscape of sites that drove consumer eyeballs (and authority in Google’s algorithm) was vast. You needed a widely-distributed presence because the long tail still drove a significant number of customers to your business. And your Google Places listing earned a significant amount of ranking potential via these citations of your business.

It’s now 2022, and Google My Business has eaten the long tail of local search.

Even from the very beginning, two things made a citation “count” towards your local rankings:

1) could Google associate the mention of your business on a third-party site with its own business index? and
2) was the site on which you were mentioned authoritative enough for keywords that you hoped to rank for such that it would convey some of that authority to your business?

In the early days of local search, there just weren’t that many vertical sites that had built a significant amount of authority — Google’s algorithm was skewed towards large horizontal Internet Yellow Pages directories.

Two things have happened in the last 15 years: vertical players have begun to dominate the organic local results, and the old Internet Yellow Pages directories are basically out of business.

So, it makes me sad that so many small businesses, and it surprises me that so many brands, continue to pay such a premium for listing management. Many appear to be doing so for the wrong reasons. I’m not saying listing management is worthless, but the retail prices I see some companies charging are nowhere near justified by the value they deliver.

To be as clear as possible:

Consistency of citations will no longer help you rank better in Google, except on the extreme margins.

Google’s entity recognition is light years ahead of where it was in 2012. Stop worrying about exact business name matches, suite numbers, and street abbreviations (the latter two never mattered anyway).

Volume of citations will no longer help you rank better in Google.

Stop buying listing management packages based on the number of sites in their distribution network.

Facebook, Yelp, and key sites in your industry are the only citations that will help you rank better in Google.

Stop buying listing management packages that do not include the key sites in your industry. All of the formerly-important horizontal directories like Superpages, Citysearch, and the like are completely irrelevant. In fact before publishing this post, I had to look up whether they are even still in business!

If you’re buying listing management for its citation value, search for a couple of your “money” keywords and take note of which directories rank in the top 20 or 30 results for those keywords.

Either pay those directories directly to manage your listing (if you feel they’re valuable enough), or buy only listing management packages that include those directories.

Don’t believe me? Test with your own data.

If your listing management package comes with a fancy analytics dashboard, compare your impressions and actions within Google My Business, and Facebook and Instagram, to comparable metrics from every other source combined. (Here, I’d imagine that Facebook and Instagram do quite well in terms of impressions, and their value as engagement-builders for existing customers should not be understated.)

Those of you doing call-tracking, look at your call analytics. How many calls per month do your GMB listings generate compared to all other local search directories combined–including Facebook and Yelp?

Those of you segmenting traffic sources in Google Analytics, aggregate your referral data from every local directory–including Facebook and Yelp–and compare it to utm_source=GMB (or however you’ve labeled your tracking parameters).

Tweet me @davidmihm and let me know what you find.

What would I do?

I’d align my time-spent and dollars-spent with the percentages from my investigation above.

If Google My Business is driving 90% of your leads, it should get a corresponding percentage of your time, effort, and resource budget. Posting great photos, encouraging reviews, responding to reviews, updating product/service menus…and now that the Messaging API has been opened up, being responsive to messages and Q&A.

And of course, if I’m wrong and GMB is driving a much smaller percentage of leads for your business relative to the long tail of directories, then by all means I’d continue to invest in that tail.

Those who know me well know that I’m no fan of Yelp (to say the least!) But if you’re a larger brand, I’d also pay at least a little attention to where Yelp is in the mix above. It may be worth paying Yelp’s premium directly to manage your listings there in bulk.

For what it’s worth, there may still be a value to cleaning up bad, out-of-date data if you’re an established business with a messy footprint, and potentially to seeding data far-and-wide if you’re a brand new business.