In the whole process of establishing and developing their businesses, local business owners usually focus on the quality of the service they provide and spreading the word by traditional marketing tools. However, there is one thing they may fail to notice right away. It’s the importance of the online presence and well-built citations. Taking care of your online reputation requires time. So, it’ll be good to consider some help. Thus, take a look at some of the main tools to help manage citations, and try to make things easier for yourself.
Citations and local SEO
In the world of modern technologies, where everything is only one click away from everyone, people tend to look up things on the internet. Thus, for example, when a person needs a certain product, he would probably try to get it online, rather than walking directly to a store for it. And if you are a marketer, and your products appear among the first search results, here comes a new customer for you. That’s where we see the importance of citations. The more your business is mentioned online, the more accessible it is to your customers. Therefore, building a good citation is more than necessary here. That would be the first step in gaining your local search visibility.
The importance of the tools to help manage citations
However, citations are not some things you simply build and then let them be. You constantly need to take care of their accuracy and consistency. If your citations seem untrustworthy, that will affect your online ranking position. But, managing your citations is not an easy task. It may take a lot of time, and definitely a lot of work. Luckily, nowadays, it seems we finally have a real helping hand by our side. Thanks to the numerous local citation software tools it is possible to control, change and update citations easier and faster.
Most of the things you used to do manually are now automatized. Depending on your current needs, you can choose from various options. There are tools focusing on only one specific feature in citation managing. On the other hand, you can also find those which offer useful solutions in many different fields. Some things are done directly by the local citation software, while the others are passed to the experienced professionals. In every case, one thing is for sure- it saves your time.
1. Whitespark
Whitespark offers various very useful software tools for citation managing. They widely help local businesses and their search marketing. With its citation finder, you can easily spot new citations, that you don’t already have, and that are necessary to improve your local ranking. On the other hand, a local rank tracker tool makes a comparison between you and your competitors and gives you a clear picture of your ranking position on the major search engines.
Finally, since we are aware of the way online reviews may affect our local businesses, Whitespark has something else to offer here. With its reputation builder, you can encourage customers to leave more feedback. And just in case there happen to be some negative reviews on your sites, the review monitoring tool will immediately let you know about it.
2. Yext
Every business owner who had ever used Yext will claim the effectiveness of their tools for handling citations. The Yext Pages together with the Knowledge Manager, make sure your customers get all the necessary information about your business. They are programmed to answer the frequently asked questions, regarding your location, contacts, working hours, current promotions, even your employees.
And, most importantly, all the information will be accurate, and easily accessible. What’s more, if you want to control all the business information your share online, Yext Listings can help there. This tool deals with the updates, analytics, and offers useful suggestions for possible improvements.
3. Moz Local
If you want to gain the reputation of being trustworthy, it is clear that the information you include in your citation needs to be correct and consistent. Therefore, it is highly important to take care of your citations after you build them. With Moz Local you can easily check on your presence on the web, thus checking the listing accuracy as well.
Also, whenever you make some change in your business’s name, address, or contact information, you need to update it immediately. However, editing your listing data can be pretty tricky, and time-consuming. Especially if you do it manually. Now, that’s where Moz Local plays its major part. With this excellent tool, you can avoid editing data on all the directories where you are listed, one by one. Instead, you just log in to Moz Local, make all the editions, and the changes will immediately be sent to all the engines and directories you are present on.
4. Synup
With a Synup set of software tools, you will basically get all you need for successful online marketing in one. Manage your citations properly in order to improve your online visibility. Employ the best techniques for analyzing the market, and your presence on it. With its tools, you will stay informed about every single review of your business that appears online. That makes it easy to react to the negative comments in no time.
Finally, let’s not forget that with Synup you will be able to update your listings whenever you want. Plus, you will always know if there are some inconsistencies in terms of the information provided in the directories or the search engines.
So, these were only some of the many interesting tools to help manage citations and improve your local business ranking. They deal with all the important aspects of the local marketing process and they seem to be very useful. Employing them would help you manage your online presence faster, and much easier as well. Therefore, forget about the old-fashioned manual ways, and make use of these fantastic software tools right now.
