Okay, so in this video, I'm going to talk about what I like to call citations. And citations is really just kind of a fancy name for a business listing citation could be considered a yellow pages listing for your business. Something you might find like your Google Plus business page, which we talked about earlier. This could be something like your Yelp page, any of these pages that are really allowing you to create your business listing. Now I'm going to show you a little bit more in depth what this tool is all about in another video. But here I'm just going to talk about citations.

What I've done is I've pulled up an example report in a tool called bright local, and in some of the future videos, I will kind of show you some of the other features of bright local, but for now, I'm just going to show you their citation tracker. I will kind of throw it in this video, you can get a free trial of this. So if you are a small business and you're looking to kind of see where you stand, you could actually go and get I believe I want to say it's either a 14 or I think it's like a 14 day trial. While they'll run you through, and you could go and pretty much check just about everything there is with your business and you get a really good idea of what's going on. So I highly recommend doing that since you you know, you get free access during the trial period.

And if you do decide you want to, you know, use this on a regular basis, it's it's fairly inexpensive, about $20 a month, I believe, for just a single business. But going through, I ran an example report here on pool company based out of Florida. And we've got a couple different tabs so I can see some of the top citations, what's considered some of the biggest properties. We've got the active citations, which were already created for this business. And then we've got a list of potential ones that could also be created for the business. Now, as I go down, I'll just give you an example of some of the top 10 which I just mentioned, you know, we've got the Google Plus business page, Yelp, Yahoo, Yellow Pages Facebook, Manta, and the list goes on and on.

And as you can see in this audit report, generally what we want to do is match every Everything. As I said in my last video, you want to match everything consistently to the name the postcode, you know, the zip and postcode, the phone number, and you want to make sure everything, the address is all consistent. So basically, I would match everything to the Google Plus page, because that's really where it's gonna be the most relevant. And that's what Google is looking at. So in this example, we have all Florida Pool and Spa center. They're based out of North Miami, Florida.

Here's the phone number. And as you can see on yellow pages in Yahoo, local, we've already got a mismatch in the phone number. So this is something that if you have the login for these types of sites, you want to go in and just fix this yourself. If you don't, it might be, you know, reaching out to their support and trying to find out if you can figure out how to get that adjusted, it may take you some time. But the other thing that really I want to focus on in this particular lectures that we can build more of these citations. And this is either something you could do yourself and your own free time for some of these bigger properties like Facebook book I highly recommend you just do this on your own.

But in terms of some of these other smaller sites, we've got literally hundreds of these other directories where we could be adding our business. This is kind of a small sample here. But what we can do is actually go out and have some of these created for us. Some of the bigger ones that you really probably want to focus on yourself like I said, would be like the Yelp the got the Google the Facebook, LinkedIn Foursquare's another one you probably could do yourself, a lot of those you could do yourself but in terms of some of these others, like you know, you snobby or hot frog or some of these others, you probably the majority of them, you could do what I like to call outsourcing, you can outsource the work and find someone else to do this for you. So, now I've kind of got a report you know, if you go sign up for bright local, you can go and look at this yourself.

As I mentioned, I'm also going to show you how to look at this with Moz. Local and another video another tool, but I'm going to bring you over to one place where you can have this done. This is a site called marketer center, and it's actually designed for SEO consultants or SEO businesses. But you can actually order a bulk creation of citations either these hyper local or big citations. And I'm just going to click Buy Now on the hyper local just to give you an idea. They'll do 40 of them for you for $39.

So you're basically paying about a buck for every citation. And they're going to ask for all your information, you know, what's the address, what's the phone number, who is the owner, all the basic information that they're going to need, and they're actually going to go out, and they're going to build, you know, as you can see here, let's do an example. If I go to potential citations, I've got all these sites where we could have our business listed, at least in this example, for all Florida pool. We could go out there and just telemarketer center. Well I'd like 40 citations built in here, the citations I need. They'll go out and they'll have that done for you and they'll send you a report in Excel and you'll be able to get a username and password there'll be an email they'll create For you, and from there, they'll be able to, you know, basically report on all the work they've done.

And the reason this is important is Google actually looks at this. And this is how one of the one of the pieces that comes into the puzzle for ranking higher in the local map pack. Another method you can do. I've already pulled up a job here, but there's a site called Upwork. And this is basically a freelance platform, you can go on and create a job. Here's a job that we created.

This is called local citation listing creation. You could basically create a job like this and say, Hey, I need someone to go create 50 citations, and what you're going to find is you're going to get a lot of people bidding on your job. Here in this example, I think we set it as fixed price. So they just threw out a big figure here. And a lot of these guys, this is all they do. Citations builders, citations expert, local SEO, researcher, local citation builders, so you have people that literally This is all they do.

A lot of them will be informative. trees here you can see Pakistan, Bangladesh, a lot of people in just other countries, India. And a lot of these guys, they'll work for a very, very small wage. I mean, in this case, we had a, for this example, you can see it's fixed price, they just threw a big number out there that you know, they'll go and do, you know, a huge amount. This guy, I was messaging and he said he would do 100 citations for $50. So that's a little bit better deal than going with marketers center.

But it depends on what you want to do. What I generally like to do is find one of these guys, you get them on Skype. And from there, you can chat with them and figure out, you know, what's the best way to approach this and you could hand them a list from bright local and just say, hey, I'd like you to create all these sites. And if you do decide to create a job you'll find, let me see if I can go to my messages really quick. Actually, in fact, I'm gonna go back when these guys apply, they'll show you an angle example, I can view their full application. If you do more.

Once they've started applying, I can view the full application that they made for my job. And you can read their profile, you know, this person's in the Philippines. And let's see, I was looking to see if they sent me. You can see all their past work here, how many hours they worked, what kind of work they were doing. They've got a portfolio down here. Let me see if I've got another example.

What I was looking for is an example report I can show you guys do, I'm just going to click on a random one and see. Well, it's not really a big deal. But basically what you want to do is kind of get the work you know, just look and see what these guys are doing. You can ask them for a sample report. Generally, it's just going to be a list of all the sites that they would have built these business listings And then from there, you're gonna be able to see, you know, the work that they did the email, they created the listing where it is live. And from there, you can go and check it out.

And a lot of cases, some of these sites are going to want like additional approval, maybe you'll have to check your email in a few days, and then, you know, click on an email, they may even want to call the business and verify that you're a real company, things like that. So those are all things that you might have to you know, put in a little bit additional work, but it's all going to be worth it because you're going to have these business listings out there. They're all going to be linking back to your website, which is good. And then you're going to have more kind of brand credibility for yourself in Google's eyes, and that's going to help you rank higher