When you are handling your business citations without a service, you may wonder if it is better to have a lot of citations or a few really good citations? Let me see if I can make this easier for you.

As you know, a citation is any combination of your name, address, phone number and/or web address on the internet. This can be really valuable if they are correct and in the right place. This is a case of quality over quantity. There is no worse headache for a marketing agency than to get a new client who comes to us with 5-million citations and half of the citations are wrong.

I would rather have 20 important citations that are accurate and manually done, than 5,000 citations that are not done well, have wrong information, and that hurt you in the end.

At one time, I recorded a YouTube video on five citations that all lawyers need. These are important. If you have these five, you can add more as you grow your site. They are:

  • Yelp
  • Justia
  • Findlaw
  • Avvo
  • Better Business Bureau

Start with these five. With these five your site is strong. As you see citations build, and since you are not using a service, be sure you double-check all citations for accuracy as they are added. This is a small job now, but if ignored it can become a monster later.

Don’t Stress

Give Google a little credit. While there are some services that are very good and if you are in need of there service, go for it. However, there are some that see a person learning as they go and they use scare tactics with citation data. One way of doing that is by telling you that as your firm and website grows and changes, keeping up with your citations will become a full-time job. They will show you reports of places that have citations that you never dreamed of. This does not matter. Google has a very deep and very smart algorithm and it works with real-time logic. For example, if you have a law firm by the name of Bob Morgan and Ken Smith Law Office, and someone typed in Bob Morgan Law Office, Google is going to pull up the site. They would also pull up Morgan and Smith, Smith Law, and any other combination. This is because it is logical. This is true with your citations. Google knows who the people are looking for and you do not need to hire a firm to spend weeks changing data in Google where change is not needed.

So, go with your top five citations and any others that are of high quality. You will be in good shape after that.