Do you Google ” Restaurants near me” and your restaurant is not showing up? Or maybe on Yelp and TripAdvisor, the same thing? You’re a ghost in the search engines. It may boil down to your lack of citations! Today, we will discover what a citation is and how to get more attention with citations and how it can change how (or if) you get found.
How to Get More Attention with Citations
Hey everybody, welcome to Reservations. This is Andrew McCauley with Whiteboard Wednesday. Welcome, thanks for joining us. Today, we are going to talk about Restaurant Citations and How to Get More Attention with Citations.
What’s a citation? Citations and reviews, some of those things we love to hate. It is where people leave their reviews and where people find you on the web. Of course, you’ve got your beautifully lovely optimized website, but that is not the only place people find you. They will find you on all sorts of websites that you may have never heard of before. But how do you get your information into those sites? How do you make sure that your information is getting found on Google and it’s the right information, not the wrong information?
Why Citations are Important?
Well, I’m here to tell you about citations, how to get more attention with citations and why it is important to make sure that you’ve got all of the data correct across the board.
In fact, there was just a recent report not long ago, which said that the local businesses that have the number one spot on Google have about 86 citations or 86 places on the web where they were mentioned. Well, restaurants have an average of 127 citations on the number one spot, which means it will be a lot harder work for you to make sure you get that spot. I want you to think about this, if people will go to Google and they did a research for “restaurants near me”, your website might not come up. Google is going to show other stuff, other local places and other websites that have a lot more traffic than you. Some of those citation sites are TripAdvisor and Yelp, and it’s very, very, very hard to beat those sites because of the sheer volume of traffic they’ve got.
So, do you throw your hands up in the air and say this is all too hard? No, you don’t. You actually get to work and make sure that your information on those sites is up to date. The simple answer on how to get more attention with citations is N, A, P, and W.
Name, Address, Phone and Website and the Importance of Consistency
This is the cornerstone to make sure that your citations are very, very good. First one, of course, is your name. Now, you’re not going to say well, my name. Here’s the truth, it is quite hard to get it right.
Therefore, you’ve got to make sure that it’s consistent. That’s the challenge. Your name has to be consistently spelled or pronounced exactly the same. It has to be shown across every single citation you can possibly manage all in the very same way.
The address also has to be the same. Now, what am I talking about? Let’s say that you’re in a suite or a lot or a different part of a building for instance. You might say suite, you might spell the word s-u-i-t-e, or you might say s-t-e. How do you spell every single thing about your site has to be consistent.
The Spelling of your Business Name
Most importantly, your business name needs to be exact. You’ve got to make sure the road name is exactly spelled as it is. Are you spelling the road name with an R-D or an R-O-A-D? It sounds crazy, but you’ve got to make sure that it’s consistent across the board.
Your phone number has to be consistent. Now, you got to probably say, “well, how do I changed my phone number?”. You don’t change your phone number, but the way you write it may be different.
- Do you do a plus one at the beginning of your phone number across the board or do you just have it as your local area code first?
- Are you using local area code with parentheses or do you have no parentheses?
- Are you including spaces and dashes in there?
It sounds crazy, but that all affect the way these listings appear.
Of course, the final thing on how to get more attention with citations is your website. Do you have the same web address on all of your listings? You need to make sure of that everything mentioned above is done with consistency.
Therefore, that’s the NAPW, name, address, phone number, and website.
Bonuses to Consider
Now, as for bonus points on how to get more attention with citations and I highly recommend is to remember the fact that you will have the ability to add other bonuses or plus points onto the site. So Google My Business lets you upload photos, videos, menus and put review sections.
Reviews
What sort of stars do you want? You want five stars, of course. Remember that reviews need to be on your citations. You’ve got to have good reviews. Good reviews are the cornerstone for a lot of businesses.
Menus
Menus and samples of your menus is also a bonus you have to consider. If you’ve got a great menu, you want to make sure you’re putting it out there so that all of these sites can see a sample of it.
Hours of Operation
This is super important as well. Hours of operation is a must have on every citation sites and it has to be consistent all the way.
Relevant Citation Sites
Now, there are a couple of tools out there that lets you do this in bulk. Sometimes it may cost a little bit of money but most of the time they’re not so bad.
Moz local is a great tool that will go out and find all your listings for monthly fare or yearly fare for about a hundred bucks, but rest assured that they will make sure that everything is put out there for you so that it’s consistent across the board.
Moz local will also go and tell you what citation sites you’re on and which ones you’re not on. The other important thing about all these citations sites is because there are literally thousands of them. However, you did not need to be on every single one of them. Only be on the ones that are relevant to you.
Quality is better than quantity. Just because it’s a site app, it doesn’t mean you have to be on it. Get on the good ones. Get on the big ones. Make sure you are on those that have a high traffic source like Yelp and Google and Facebook, and TripAdvisor. There are other little tiny fringe ones that you probably don’t need to be on, unless its a perfect fit for your business.
Just a little rewind, these are just a few things you need to consider, your business name, address, phone, website. However, remember that these extras like photos, videos, menus, reviews, and your hours of operation will also really help you a lot to get more attention with citations.
Go and do a search for your own business. Go to Google, search for your business or your restaurant’s name and have a look at what pops up and focus on all of the different citation sites that are serving your business. That’s the citations you want to be on and you need to make sure you’re on. If you’re not on contact these sites, that’ll let you add those sites there for you too. So you got to do that and then you are good as gold.
All right, that is a wrap. That’s Reservations. Whiteboard Wednesday. Tomorrow we’re going to rip apart some Facebook Ads. It may be a restaurant that we’re looking at, maybe not, but come along, check him out and we’ll show you exactly what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your Facebook Ads.
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