5 Things Window Companies Must Know About Local Citations

BY WELTON HONG

If you’re not sure what local citations are or why they’re important, you could be leaving money on the table

Is your window coverings business putting in the work to get the right kinds of local citations? If you’re not sure what local citations are or why you need to chase them, you could be leaving large, attractive crumbs on the table for your competition to gobble up. Here are five things window and home improvement companies need to know about local citations.

What are local citations?

When your business is mentioned online along with contact or identifying information (such as your city, address or phone number), that’s a local citation. Citations can appear on a variety of sites, including your own pages and profiles, review sites, local news pages and industry listings.

Examples of places citations are found include Google, Yelp, your site’s contact page, Facebook and Window Fashion VISION’s online Industry Resource Directory.

What information is important for a local citation?

The information included in a citation depends on where it appears. Reviews, for example, make up one component of some local citations, but you’re more likely to find this element on Google, Angie’s List or Yelp rather than within industry organization listings.

The most important elements of a local citation are your business’s name, address and phone number. This is known as the NAP, and it helps link your company name with a specific location for both users and search engines. The URL for your website is also sometimes considered a critical component; when the website is included, it’s called the NAP+W.

Other elements of local citations can include business category, directions to your location, a description of your business and hours of operation. Fax numbers, email addresses, images and videos, taglines and even the forms of payment you accept can also be integrated into local citations.

Why does this even matter?

In the spirit of “no press is bad press,” it’s easy to see that local citations are probably good for business. At the very least, when people see the information online, they are exposed to your brand. But these citations matter much more than that.

Local citations help enforce the fact that you are a local business in a specific niche—for both search engines and consumers. Google and other search engines use local citations as one factor when compiling search results, including map and Local Pack results. When your business is mentioned a lot online—and the information appears to be consistent and accurate—experts believe search engines see the data as more valid, which can escalate your window treatment business’s website in rankings.

Citations also help consumers find your site when they search online. If your company is listed by many sites as a window blind company in Dallas, for example, that increases the chances of a consumer finding you in a search for “window blinds Dallas.” It also increases the likelihood that your business will come up in a mobile search when users are looking for a store or service near them.

How important is accuracy for local citations?

Given that local citations often appear in information published by others, you don’t always have control over the accuracy of the information in them. But accuracy is important for a few reasons.

If you have numerous high-quality citations and all the information is basically the same, that’s a positive factor when it comes to search engine ranking. Additionally, if consumers find your company’s listing on another site and decide to act, they’ll be derailed if the phone number or website link turns out to be incorrect. Most won’t take time to find more accurate information; they’ll simply move on to the next business in the listings.

Policing all of your citations is likely not the best way to spend your resources, so it’s a good idea to concentrate on the highest-quality listings and most important elements. Ensure all local citations you control are accurate, including those on Google My Business, your own pages and social profiles, and any industry listings that let you maintain your own information. After that, consider contacting other listings that have inaccurate information in order of priority.

According to a BrightLocal survey of local ranking experts, the most important citations come from niche and industry directories, national and local directories, industry associations and local government sites.

You can also prioritize the type of information you want to correct. When it comes to your phone number, 95 percent of BrightLocal’s experts said an exact match was important. Just over 85 percent said an exact match was important for the city. The majority of experts also said zip codes and URLs must be an exact match. Only half were concerned with an exact match for street address, and 55 percent said your business name only needs to be a close match if other NAP components are accurate.

What’s the best way to build your local citation presence? Established businesses in the home improvement niche likely already have some local citations online due to reviews, their own sites and mentions by other local organizations. But more is better here—as long as it’s of high quality.

Build your local citation presence by ensuring your NAP information is listed and coded appropriately on your website using schema markup and claiming all listings and profiles with sites such as Google, Yelp, Facebook and others.

Next, submit your company information to relevant industry and local listings, including chambers of commerce and associations you belong to. When you take part in or sponsor local events, ask about having your full NAP+W listed on the event or organization page.

Almost 70 percent of BrightLocal’s ranking experts note that manually submitting information to listings is the best way to ensure accuracy, but pushing data via real-time distributors is faster. If you’re not sure where to start with building local citations—or you don’t have the time or resources to get this marketing task done—you can also work with a marketing firm with experience in the home improvement niche.

However you land local citations, know that it’s important to do so. While no ranking effort stands alone, citations can be a way to put you over the top and ensure your window coverings website shows up in prime real estate on search engine result pages. z

Welton Hong is the founder of Ring Ring Marketing and a leading expert in creating case generation from online to the phone line. He is the author of “Making Your Phone Ring with Internet Marketing for Window Covering Companies.”

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