Local citations refer to mentions of your business on the World Wide Web. This can be mentions involving the combination of your company details like name, address, mobile number, website address, and zip or postal code of your company/business. Citations are very important local SEO that can lead to an increased visibility on local search engine result pages (SERP).
Local citations do not necessarily need to feature all your business details, in fact, they are available in several forms (of mentions) which include:
- Company name.
- Company name and website.
- Company name and phone number.
- Company name, phone number, and website.
- Company name, phone number, and address.
- Company name, phone number, address, and website and so on.
David Mihm coined the term citation in 2008 when he published the post Local Vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link.
For a citation to be regarded as a complete local citation, it should include NAP – Name of company, the address of the company, and phone number of the company. If a citation doesn’t include all three of these, it can be called a ‘partial citation.’
Occasionally, NAPW or UNAP citations are often discussed. In these citations, the U (in UNAP) refers to the URL, while the W (in NAPW) refers to the Website. You also get additional value from the website link as it helps search engines better connect a citation to your business.