How To Carry Out A Detailed, Manual Local Citation Audit.
Citations (mentions of your business NAP) have a huge impact in Local search results and that is why an adding your existing citations is of vital importance at the beginning of your local SEO campaign.
Using some advanced Google search modifiers you are able to locate mentions of your business on pages around internet. Then manually the citations are accurate.
There are some automated ways to carry out this audit, including Bright Local & whitespark.ca – but a manual audit is the only way to be sure that you have checked every citation that is indexed by Google.
What Google needs to see from your citations is consistency, and that’s why an Citation audit is of such importance.
Before I show you how to find all of your indexed citation sources using Google, I’ll explain why the searches we will carry out work.
We carry out a minimum of 3 independent searches in Google to search for your citation looking for mentions of your business name, telephone number, address and postcode.
Each search is searching Google’s entire index of pages for mentions of you business name, telephone number, address and postcode.
Searching for each component individually and compiling the data into and excel spreadsheet will allow you to locate inconsistencies which will be hurting your Google Local rankings.
In all of these searches include -site:www.yourwebsite.co.uk as this prevent pages of your website being included in the results.
The searches include the element which we are searching for contained inside ” ” – this tells Google that we only want to be shown search results containing that exact term.
The searches we carry out are:
Search for mentions of your business name
“Your Full Business Name” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk
and remember to also search for
“Your Business Name Mistakes” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk
Search for mentions of your telephone number
“01234 567890” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk
and remember to also search for
“01234567890” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk
Search for mentions of your business address
“123 main street” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk
Search for mentions of your postcode
“your postcode” “main word of your business”
This example is slightly different and searches for your postcode in conjunction with a individual words of your business name.
Collating The Data & Analyzing Your Results
As you carry out each search, record the results in a spreadsheet like so:
At this stage simply visit each result and record it in your spreadsheet.
After you have collected the data from Google, you need to collate the data into the spreadsheet in order to precisely audit the results.
Before we audit the results, remove duplicate rows from your excel spreadsheet.
Then visit each link and record data by copy / pasting into your spreadsheet – Its best to copy / paste the data so we avoid any human error!
Watch over my shoulder as I carry out a demo Local citation audit:
Download The Citation Audit Spreadsheet Here
