If your business name, address and phone number appear differently across the web, Google has to guess which version is right. It usually guesses badly, and your business drops out of the map results while a competitor with tidier listings takes the spot.
Those listings are called citations. Fixing them is unglamorous work, and for most local businesses it is the cheapest ranking improvement available.
What a citation actually is
A citation is any mention of your name, address and phone number on another website. Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, your chamber of commerce, the directory your trade body runs. Some you created. Many you did not: data aggregators scrape business records and publish them whether you asked or not.
Google reads those mentions as votes on where you are and what you are called. Agreement builds confidence. Disagreement does the opposite.
How local rankings actually get decided
Google weighs three things for local results: how close you are to the searcher, how relevant you are to what they typed, and how prominent your business appears to be. Citations feed the third, and they quietly feed the first, because your address is how Google knows where you are.
Someone searching for a coffee shop nearby never sees any of this. They see three results in a map pack. Getting into that pack is the whole game, and consistent listings are part of the entry fee.
The problem is usually duplicates, not gaps
Most businesses assume they need more listings. Usually they need fewer.
Duplicates pile up over years. You moved office and the old address stayed live. Someone set up a second Facebook page. A suite number appears on some listings and not others. An old mobile number is still out there. Each version splits your signal, and Google cannot tell which one is you.
So the work runs in this order: find the duplicates, remove or merge them, then correct what remains, and only then add new listings.
Where to start
Decide the exact format of your name, address and phone number first, down to whether you write Street or St. Write it down. Every listing has to match it character for character.
- Google Business Profile. Formerly Google My Business, renamed in 2022. This is the one that matters most by a wide margin. Claim it, verify it, fill it in completely.
- Bing Places. Far less traffic, but it feeds other services and takes ten minutes.
- Apple Business Connect. Increasingly how iPhone users find local businesses, and still ignored by most competitors.
- Facebook. Often where a duplicate is hiding.
- Yelp, and your industry’s directories. Yelp matters more for restaurants and trades than for professional services. Your trade association listing may be worth more than ten generic directories.
After that, work down the directories that actually rank for your service in your area. Search for what a customer would type and see which listings show up. Those are the ones worth claiming.
How many do I need?
There is no target number, and anyone selling you a package of 300 listings is selling volume because volume is easy to invoice. Twenty accurate listings on sites people actually use beat two hundred on directories nobody visits.
Expect the fix to take a few weeks of back and forth, because some sites need email verification, a postcard, or a phone call before they will let you edit anything. Movement in rankings usually shows up a month or two after the corrections settle, not the week you make them.
Then leave it alone, mostly
Citations are not an ongoing project. Once they agree, they stay agreeing until something changes: you move, you change your number, you rebrand. Check them once or twice a year, and properly whenever one of those happens.
If you would rather not spend a fortnight logging into directories, this is part of our local search work, and it connects directly to your wider search engine ranking. Tell us where you are listed and we will tell you what is wrong before you commit to anything.