Local SEO & Google My Business Product Expert

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Beginners Guide to Citations

Introduction

What is a citation?

A citation is any mention of your business out on the web. It can come in various forms and consists of any combination of one or more of the following four items:

  • Company name
  • Company address
  • Business phone number
  • Website address

Note: It does not matter whether the information links to your website or not.

The accompanying spreadsheets provide links to various sites which contain citations for your business at its current location, and for the new location.

Citations come in various formats, following are examples:

  • Company name only
  • Company name & phone number
  • Company name, phone number, & address
  • Company name, phone number, address, & link to website
  • Company name with website address

Why do they matter?

Citations are a basic part of helping your business be found online.

For local businesses (businesses with a shopfront or who work within a service area), citations are a must-have ingredient in your mix. Local SEO is all about “entity signals” – in other words, bits and pieces on the web that confirm your entity (your business) is for real, is where you say it is, and has a good reputation.

Local Pack display

Citations play a key role in the overall “findability” of a business – as in, when people are looking for a business in their area. They also create many other avenues for people to find your business and read reviews.

When you want your business in the top 3 or have higher visibility overall, one of the your tasks is to “clean up” (correct the information) and claim your citations.

After claiming a listing, update it to be consistent with Google and other listings.  In other words, don’t have your business listed as Fred Nerk Enterprises in one place, Fred Nerks on Google, and Nerk Inc on still another site. Google does tolerate some minor variations, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say to make them all the same.

And that includes the street address, phone number, hours, business categories and more.

One really good thing about business categories on citations is they help search engines better understand your business. Often people will say Google’s categories don’t accurately describe my business.  Many citation sites will have the exact category, or even better, allow for a hierarchy of categories.

example of a hierarchy of categories.

Where do they come from?

Citations can be found in a wide variety of places – some a business can control, some not. You may have the idea that since you haven’t built any citations yourself, they won’t be there. Unfortunately that’s not the case. And if you haven’t built these yourself, there’s a high chance they will have *wrong* information about your business.

example citation
sample citation with name, address, phone and link to website all included

Examples of sources include:

  • Yellow Pages™
  • Yelp
  • Local business directories (such as TrueLocal, Womo, and lots more)
  • Industry related websites (such as the Australian Dental Association)
  • Newspaper articles online
  • Social Media pages

On the image above (links not active), you can see a citation of a business from the Yellow Pages™. This has all sorts of info about the business including all four key elements. Citations can be this extensive, or completely minimal such as a business name written in a blog post.

This content is for members only.

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How to Link to a Specific GMB Question & Answer block

Ever wondered how to link to Google’s Question & answer block on your Google My Business listing? You might do it to

It’s not simple, but it is easy. It gets a little technical, so I’ll break the URL down in to steps.

Let’s do this with business named Australian Ugg Boots P/L and they’re in Braeside.

  1. Go to a Google search, and type in the business name. Or business & location, if needed. You’re aiming to get the knowledge panel for that biz to display.
  2. The URL will be long. Google makes its search results URLs complicated by putting in a bunch of info not needed for the query itself. Much of the “junk” in the URL is for Google’s own use. It includes things like the browser, version, language and so on. https://www.google.com/search?q=Australian+Ugg+Boots+P%2FL+braeside&oq=Australian+Ugg+Boots+P%2FL+braeside&aqs=chrome..69i57.2787j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
    The first part of the URL will always be
    https://www.google.com/search?q=
    and the second part will always be the search phrase you entered
    Australian+Ugg+Boots+P%2FL+Braeside
    (a + separates each word and the “/” is converted into ASCII as a %2FL). The entire rest of the URL is not needed for our purposes.
  1. Click on the See all questions link
  2. You may notice Google has just added #d,2 to the end of your URL.
  3. Click on the specific question and you’ll see the #d,2 has been changed to a #lpqa=d,3,a,AIe9…dbS.
  4. This brings up the Q&a box for a specific question.  The question is at the top, followed by all answers. The AIe9…dbS is a unique number for that specific Question and answers. The long string of numbers and letters is 140 characters. It is different for each Q&a.

Copy and paste the URL into a document and strip out everything past the first query and up to the #lpqa

So putting the pieces together, you to give a link to a client, you’d use:
https://www.google.com/search?q=business+name+location#lpqa=d,3,a,uniqueid

URL parameters to add to your query for Google’s Question & answers:

  • #lpqa=a,,d,1 create a question box for a listing
  • #lpqa=d,2 see all questions
  • #lpqa=d,3,a,AIe9...dbS see the Q&A box for a specific question. The question is at the top, followed by all answers. The specific Q&a box id is 140 characters long, and made up of numbers and letters both uppercase and lowercase..

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Customer Review Links – Finally! No CID or PlaceID needed

Up until now, Google has made it ridiculously hard for businesses to give customers a link to write reviews for their Google listing. You needed an easy way to invite customers to leave reviews.

Google’s Answer for years has been to manually create a link for customers to write reviews1

Google’s own documentation suggests two ways:

  1. Copying the link from search. The resulting link is too long to put on a business card or letter, and scary looking if you put it in an email. OR
  2. Go to one of their tools, do a search for your business, grab the number out of the tool and paste it on the end of another URL. If you’ve ever tried copy & pasting on a mobile phone, you’ll know just why this option is horrid. Add to that, if the business is a service area business (someone that only comes to your home or business to provide a service) Google’s tool won’t return the PlaceID number.

Based on the number of times we would get questions from people asking for their CID or PlaceID in the forums, it was clear Google’s tool method was not a good option. My guess is most folks used to take the long link from search and use Google’s now defunct URL shortener to come up with something to give to clients.

Business owners who wanted to give a short and sweet web address had to devise their own work-arounds to make it easy for customers.

Fortunately, Google has heard the feedback and have just released a new feature on Google My Business listings called “short name”.

Short Name = g.page/

GMB's new vanity URLThis new web address (URL) enables each business to create a unique Local Vanity URL for each listing. Bear in mind, this is intended for smaller businesses with fewer locations rather than franchises or businesses with lots of locations.

Short names are only available for verified listings.

The short name does not replace either the CID approach or the PlaceID approach. Both of those methods still work, and will continue to work along side the g.page link.

At time of writing, this feature is rolling out to both Android & Desktop.

Short name endpoints

An endpoint is the destination target element of the GMB listing. Thinking of your listing, you might have a reason to direct people to your reviews, reservation feature, photos, appointments, and so on.

  • g.page/shortname/review – open up to a “write a review” box.
  • g.page/shortname/reserve – only available if you’re using a 3rd party “reserve with Google” partner, and your industry is restaurants, health or  beauty.

As this feature rolls out, the range of options is expected to grow.

Choosing your Google short name

Keep your short name simple so you can easily promote it, and customers can remember it.

Google allows you to choose your own custom name for your business. It is not dependent on your GMB listing name, however Google will recommend your biz name.

To pick a unique short name, try to use words that represent your business name, brand, location, or other description. For example, you can use your business name with your location, like your city or neighbourhood.

There is no specific ‘right’ to names, unless there is a legal matter. Remember these short names are global, so just because you may have legal rights to the name in your country, it’s unlikely you’ll have rights everywhere on the planet.

Names can be 5-32 characters in length. There are no rules for acronyms, and each location gets just one unique name. If you do have multiple locations, it makes sense to use a combination of your chain name + location.  Google is working on the right experience for medium to large chains. For now, listings have to claim names individually. Bulk editing may come later.

Because these are not officially being indexed, keyword stuffing your short name doesn’t make a lot of sense. (I say officially because I can find thousands of URLs that are indexed.) Keyword stuffing is also against the guidelines, so you could end up with your listing suspended.

The short name gets quickly turned into a maps link when your customers use it.

Google also says the links are not case-sensitive, but if you want to make the URL easier to read, you can use caps to help separate words for humans. For example: g.page/ShortName/ is the same as g.page/shortname/.

For the technically minded, be aware the URL has a 302 redirect, meaning no link juice or ranking benefit.

Changing your short name

You can change your local vanity URL up to 3 times in 12 months. You can’t update an existing one, only create a new variation on that name.

Don’t take this lightly, there are repercussions. If you change your custom name, the short name turns into a Google search. Eg: https://www.google.com/search?q=shortname.

HOWEVER

google website 404

    • If you’re using an endpoint such as “/review/”, a changed vanity URL will turn into 404. That’s not a good user experience.
    • If you change a short-name, the old name stays out in the “register” for a period of time and is not usable by others. Am checking with Google on how long that is supposed to be in quarantine, as testing shows it’s weeks and still counting.
    • If you change a short name, there is no “redirect” option to move people along with your change. The URL simply malfunctions.
    • There may be times when the short name is not removed if not deemed as abusive. Google recommends you choose another name.
    • You can have only have one (1) short name, and it cannot be transferred.

Who can change the name? 

Listing owner, managers & site managers. Communication between the parties will be key to keeping any naming conventions intact.

Tracking the vanity URL

Google are not including visit use information in GMB Insights, unfortunately.

Close examination of the final URL reveals Google has inserted tracking codes on the base URL. The source is defined as coming from g.page. It doesn’t, however, have a source if the URL has an endpoint.

Still, it would be useful if they did extend the tracking to all URL’s. As the feature expands, I can see value in knowing if people are using the link for reviews, maybe photos, appointments, or any other element.

Play Nice

Use this where it makes sense, and how it makes sense. Remember this system belongs to Google and they can suspend the link, the listing, or the whole account, depending on the circumstances.

1 – source: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7035772