The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Image credit: Loren Javier[1]
It’s a whale of a question: Does citation management still matter in the grand scheme of local SEO? Our industry has been trying to gauge which way the wind is blowing on this subject for years now, and I’ve been professionally frustrated by a lack of large-scale studies to inform my own take.
SEOs live through ongoing cycles of one formerly-favorite tactic or another being proclaimed “dead”, whether that’s link building, guest posting, or search engine optimization, itself. The reality, we come to realize, is much more nuanced than the headlines. I wanted more than my own anecdotal opinion as to how location data distribution and management correlate with shifts in visibility and engagement, and was gratified when discussions with Uberall[2] helped spark a major study with real numbers.
Today, I’ll share the results of this study[3] which interested me most in hopes of offering a data-based answer as to whether citations still matter, as well as whether the local businesses you market should be paying for ongoing local business listing management services.
Useful context for the citation question
Professionals say citations are a piece of the pie
A structured citation is an online listing of a local business on a platform that exists to publish this type of information. The above screenshot shows a structured citation for a restaurant on Yelp, containing basic contact data for the eatery, as well as a variety of other enrichments such as ratings, reviews, and images.
A decade ago, citations were widely considered to be a top local search ranking factor. Over the past eight