So let's look at managing your citations. Now you're going to need to check your citation accuracy, that's going to be a key thing. We'll show you how to do that in a moment. But what you're going to be have to be prepared to do is clean up inaccurate citations. Now, this is where a bulk of the work is when you set up a local SEO for the first time. So when you create that local SEO strategy, and you're building up your citations and you're linking back to your Nat page, you're gonna find inaccurate citations.

Now, that can be a little bit challenging because you need to have them close down. Oftentimes you have to speak up and rank. And there are actually a few businesses out there that are very dishonest about their citations. what they'll do is they'll create a citation or they have citations and they're inaccurate. So then you want to go and clean that up, and they will try to charge you for deleting it or cleaning it up. And what they'll do is they'll do a seven day delay or we can have it done straight away.

These are scam merchants Don't get involved. with them, insist on that and you may even have to threaten to report to Google, if you think they're actually carrying this scam out, and that will usually bring them into light. Now the other thing we have to remember is when we create a new citation strategy, and we're starting to build it, that a lot of them are actually really particular about who they put on their list. So the decent ones will say to you, your website content is too thin and what that means is you haven't got enough content. So make sure that when you submit that your websites finished, don't try and submit a partially done website, make sure the websites finished all the copies in place all the websites finished and then put it into the directories because what will happen is you will apply a no refuse and then you have to resubmit or you might be blocked from then on it.

So make sure your website's in the right place. Now. One of the things we're going to have to make sure we do is add As we create these, we're gonna have to let our client know we're working on behalf of a client, that they're going to be getting contacted from these directories, which are going to claim that the best thing since sliced bread for SEO, all of them are going to claim this and try and sell them something, some type of premium listing. And they're going to try and claim they're going to give you traffic and all the rest of it. So you have to let your client know and give them a script where they just simply say, yeah, I'm sorry, I don't deal with the local SEO, I actually subcontract that out, I can give you their number. And you can get in touch with them.

Make sure that all the communication, especially if you're managing it on behalf of a client comes through you. Now the other thing you're going to need to do is make sure that as you sign up you untick email boxes, especially if you're signing up using an email address from a client. So you don't want them to be getting loads of spam in future. So make sure you untick all of those and also make sure that your client gives you access to monitoring the email address if possible. If not, they need to notify you straight away. Another top tip is this build up a citation access list.

What does that mean? That means of every place where you create directory, you need to make a note of the address and the details, the name and the password, the login name and the password you've used for that directory. Because what will happen is your change your phone number, or something else will change in the business, we might move the business and you won't remember where you've put all the citations. And you can have to go back and do it the hard way. Because if you keep a spreadsheet with all this information on, you're good to go. Now how many citations you're going to need, you probably want to start with a minimum of aiming for 20 top citations when you're building up your citations, but then over time, keep adding keep looking, keep coming back, keep trying to find new directories and we're going to go into some of the sites building strategies as we go through this course.

But make sure that you've got the minimum 20 to start with. So lots of top tips there. And let's go and have a look now at checking our citation accuracy. So what are the tools we can use for checking whether our citations are accurate? What do we mean by that the dress and information on the citation on the directory listing is the same as on that page. So one of the best tools we can use is moz.com.

Forward slash local. Another one is yext.com. Although I've heard these used to practice some pretty naughty tactics where you sign up with them, you'd pay for it. And then if you stopped paying, they would delete your directory listings. And then if they're still doing that, but I've read that, so be careful if you use those. Now the other one you can use his nap hunter in the Chrome Store, which is a Chrome extension which you use on your browser.

There's a piece of software. And that is a great place to go and check your citations. Now, most local is going to give you the top level sites. And that's great. But you're going to need to make sure that it's accurate in your country as well. So you might need if you're in a different country, besides sort of UK or the US, you're using this, just go and see what sort of results it's going to give you.

Now you also have white spark and bright local and these are paid. Now I'd suggest you have a look at investing one of these if you are a marketing agency, learning local SEO, because they're going to have a lot of automation and features and finding things that are really going to help you you might even consider as well just signing up and using them if you're setting up your own page. So you can get a 30 day trial and do most of the work or just sign up for a couple of months. Because they're going to have some tools and functionality that's really going to help you speed the process up but you don't have to use them. We just follow this course. This will enable you to do all the work.

They've just been Got some clever little bits of software that's gonna help you. So here we are, we're gonna just enter our business and our postcode here. And let's just see what we get. So let's just see what happens when we search for that. And Moz. Local now is going to actually make this work.

So we're checking our citation accuracy. We're using moz.com. Local. So it's asking which one of these we want to use? Well, this is us. So we want to make sure we use that it's done search, it's found thing now and now it's going to check for citation accuracy.

So really important process we want to go for. So we've got some complete, some incomplete, some inconsistent, some duplicates, so this is a great way for you to actually go now and start checking your citation accuracy. So we really, really want to Use ES. And then each one of these is when you hover over is going to give you a warning, you can go and check that saying duplicate, incomplete. So it's, it's given us a warning that it thinks the Facebook is incomplete that there's some data missing from that one. And we can then go along and see that we don't have anything on this one being incomplete.

So we haven't listed anything our central index, incomplete, inconsistent, and we can start to see so and then we can go in and see where they are, and actually then track down like Thompson local, and go and start filling those out. It's gonna say Little things like, you can add some more photos. Now this is really important. If you want a quality listing, it does pay to actually go in and add some images when they offer it. So it's usually good to have some stock images that you've maybe used on the website of the business that you've got saved and then you can go in and add those two Each of those uploaded, and it doesn't hurt to tag that with some keywords when you add them to a directory, so rename your image in relation to your listing won't hurt to do it, I'm not promising to give you any SEO benefit.

So for instance, if I put an image up into commercial photography in that directory, I will be linking for that keyword term, which we're going to be explaining later on that directory. So make sure you pop across the Muslim circle to check your citation accuracies. So here's the Chrome extension, nap hunter name, address, phone number Hunter. So if you're on Chrome is add this to Chrome. And then you'll be able to use this to track down lots of citations and check their accuracy. So it's a great little tool, if you're going to be doing a lot of this and you want to just add that to Chrome.

So when we're building up citations, we'll start with the citation tools as we've expressed They tend to pick the top level citation sources to start with those first, for example, muzzle local, which we recommended in the last slide. So, data entry can be a lot of work. So you might want to consider hiring a virtual assistant on Freelancer comm or another one of these websites where you can hire a virtual assistant. And then you can give them a spreadsheet of sites that they can go in and update for you. Now one of the things we want to do is, if it's a lot of work, we might want to consider using roboform comm for data entry. So that's going to help us if we just go there, a little bit software, get the software, and then what that's gonna allow us to do is put a nap data in and as we go in, it's a bit like the Google tools for filling out auto forms, but that's going to really speed the process up.

So we want to piggyback competitors to find the less obvious citation sources and the way we do That is by putting this search into Google. So literally, as it is here, FB heroes mp4, and then the dash site and web address. Now, if you do that search, what's gonna happen is you're going to be shown all the places where that's linked to. So you can take a competitor, put this search in, and they will then show all the reference sites to that. So you can then go through and see where they're actually getting their citations from. So that's really powerful.

So we'll have a look at that in a second. But before we do, I want to make quick note, only build citations on good quality sites. What do I mean by that? citations on bad sites need to be avoided if we get a citation or a bad site that can actually lower our citation ranking. And if you remember, we use ww majestic.com to check our trust flow citation flow. So we'd go there and check a citation, a directory list.

And if we're a little bit unsure, see whether we want to actually place our citations on there. Don't rush out there and just play citations on any way that will give you a listing, you actually want to go and create that information, those citations on good quality sites only. So let's just show you how that search might work. So here's our search term, we're saying, look for SME heroes, which is a company name and P e for seven mg, which is the postcode or what is known in the US as a zip code. And then we're saying any site that refers to this site that contains this information, please show us those sites. So if we hit search on that, what we're now going to do is we're going to see that free indexes listing as LinkedIn, we're going to talk about LinkedIn and social media sites later on for backlinks.

We've got a link here, website design, graphic design, and we can see that if I was a competitor and I wanted to compete with us locally, then I would be thinking Hmm, I need to get myself on this marketing agency in Peterborough. Obviously I do my due diligence and make sure they're a good site by checking their citation flow, trust flow. But we would then be looking to get a listing on there and we would keep going on like bark, bark, bark. They're getting some rankings starting to compete independent, you start seeing and then you can compare and think, Oh, I haven't got that one touch local. I haven't got that one. And hopefully you can see how this is built up.

Because now you're actually starting to find a place as backlinks. So find a competitor that's doing well in local search and go and duplicate their citations. top tip there, that will really really, really boost your local SEO