Local citations are listing sites that give you both local authority and backlinks. Citations are important for helping search engines find and crawl your website, giving your website credibility, and providing name-address-phone number (NAP) information to local search engines. The key to having great local search results is to have local citations with consistent information. Name, address, phone number, website URL, and email address are all key local identifiers for local search results.
So as you add your local business to citation sites across the web, how do you keep track of the information and status of submissions? The best thing you can do is stay organized on your own. Create a spreadsheet with all the citations you submit to. Make a note in the spreadsheet with the status of each submission. If you submit your business but the listing is not yet live, not that it is “submitted” in the spreadsheet. That way, you can go back and check later to make sure the submission has gone through. If the listing goes live right away, mark that the listing is “live”. If there is already an inaccurate listing for your business on the local listing site, mark that it is “live – wrong info”. Many listing sites have slow processes for changing inaccurate listings. If you mark that the information is wrong, you will know that you need to go back to follow up at some point. As you find more listing sites, add them to the spreadsheet and keep track of the status of your submissions along the way.
Once you are keeping track of your listing sites personally, you can always use local listing tools such as BrightLocal and MozLocal to double check your work and find more listing opportunities.