Here is a little Christmas gift for all local Citation builders: a carefully curated list of the top 50 Citation Sources for businesses in the US & UK.*
Over 1 Million Local Citation Sources Found
Between March-May 2011, the research team at BrightLocal conducted a huge Citation Analysis project.
Over 480,000 Google Places listings were analyzed across 40 business sectors and 100 locations. The Citation information was extracted into a database of over 1.1 million individual citation sources.
This extensive list was filtered down, removing all brand and business ‘brochure-ware’ sites, leaving a list of 15,000 genuine citation sources.
Some of these sites appeared hundreds of thousands of times within Google’s citation index and are extremely powerful citations opportunities.
In June 2011, Google removed citation content from Google Places profiles and this information is now hidden forever (publicly anyway).
Citations Are Crucial To Effective Google Places Ranking
While these citation domains may no longer be visible their impact on Google Places ranking remains as important as ever. The following Chart shows the top 5 ranking factors from the2011 Local Search Ranking Factors survey.
Chart 1 – 2011 Local Search Ranking Factors – ‘Significance of Citations’
Quantity of Citations is considered the 4th most important SEO factor for Local Search ranking.
**Source – 2011 Local Search Ranking Factor Survey – MihmorandumTop 50 Citation Sources & Some Extra Juicy Information
These two tables show the top 50 Citation Sources for US and UK markets. (Note:*Google removed citation data from Google Places before citation data cold be gathered for other countries. )
The Frequency Count shows the number of times each domain was identified on the 480,000 GP listings analyzed; some domains were found multiple times per GP listing.
To make them this citation list even more useful, I have included extra data such as Type of Siteand whether each site offers a Free or Paid Listing (or no listing at all). This data was gathered by the BrightLocal research team to supplement the data held on these 15,000 Citation Sources.
Top 50 US Citation Sources
Top 50 UK Citation Sources
You can download a full copy of the tables above in Excel format here.
3 Useful Tools To Help With Your Citation Building
- CitationTracker (from BrightLocal)**
- WhiteSpark
- Local Search Toolkit
**For purposes of full disclosure – I am the Founder of BrightLocal and therefore biased in favor of BrightLocal’s tools.
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