Which Citations and Backlinks Help Your Google Business Profile Rank

Do citations and backlinks help a Google Business Profile rank?

Yes. In the checklist built from Whitespark’s study of local search ranking factors, citation and link factors show up at 19th, 21st, 22nd and 25th. Two of them:

• the quality of the inbound links pointing at your Google Business Profile landing page, which is the website listed on your profile;
• the consistency of your citations across the primary directories.

Together they tell Google that you are who you say you are, what you do and where you should rank, and they give you some authority for the keywords you want.

What is a citation?

A citation is anywhere your name, address and phone number are listed. You will see it abbreviated as NAP.

A Yelp listing is the standard example: the business name, the hours, the phone number and a link to the website. Yellow Pages, Tripadvisor and small local directories work the same way.

Here is how Google uses them. Someone types “window cleaning near me” and Google has about 10 window cleaning companies in the area that could rank. If one company’s name, address and phone number appear in 150 other places on the web and another’s appear in only 20, the first one gets a feather in its cap. It is a little more likely to rank because Google sees it as the more reputable business.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is anywhere somebody else has linked to your website. A guest post is one way to get one: write some content, send it to a local business, and ask them to post it on their blog. The post links back to your page, and Google counts that as a backlink.

There are also services that build backlinks for you.

Why relevance matters more than volume

Anyone can go out and build a thousand citations on random directories all over the world. What Google wants to see is relevance, in two forms.

Local relevance. A beach bonfire company in the Florida panhandle is listed on Visit South Walton. Google knows that site is located in that area, so the listing tells Google where the business is. Because the listing also links to the company’s website, it works as a backlink too.

Industry relevance. If you are a plumbing company, find the plumbing directories and get on them. BrightLocal has a list of the top listing sites for each industry, with entries for trades such as cleaners and chiropractors. Some of those directories are paid and some are not.

How to get citations built

You have two options.

1. Do it yourself. Go to each directory, create an account with an email and a password, and add all of your business information. It can be done, but it is a very manual process.
2. Pay a service. It is normally well worth $50 to $100.

Two services used here many times:

• SEO Builder. A citation building package was 75 citations for $110 at the time of recording. You get a spreadsheet of every citation created, with links.
• Fat Joe. A little better at building citations locally. You also get a report of everything they built. Turnaround is less consistent and is not always the seven days quoted.

Do something with it

This is the last part of the series, and none of it is a good use of your time until you act on it. If you have watched every part and done nothing, start with the smallest job: change your main business category, which takes seconds. Then start getting more reviews and work through the rest.