You have optimised your Google Business Profile, you collect positive reviews, and yet a competitor rated lower than you appears just above in the local pack. The problem does not necessarily come from your listing itself. It may come from what Google finds, or fails to find, elsewhere on the web about your company.
What a local citation is (and why Google pays attention to it)
A local citation is simply a mention of your name, address and phone number on a site that is not yours: a business directory, a chamber of commerce, a partner, a piece in the local press. Each mention is a clue Google uses to check that your company really exists, and that it really is where it claims to be. Moz points out that the consistency of this information, often summarised by the acronym NAP (name, address, phone), is among the signals search engines use to judge how reliable a local business is. An address written differently on three sites, and Google starts to doubt.
Free tool: type your company name in quotation marks into Google and look at the first ten results. If you spot two different addresses or a phone number that does not match yours, you have just found your problem in five minutes.
The directories that genuinely matter for a small company
- Your Google Business Profile, by far the most decisive for appearing in the local pack.
- General directories, still consulted by a share of your customers.
- Your professional networks: your Facebook business page and your LinkedIn profile.
- Your chamber of commerce or the sector directories for your trade.
- The review platforms tied to your line of business (Tripadvisor for restaurants, for instance).
Fixing inconsistencies before they cost you customers
Start with your Google listing, the most consulted of all. If it is not already done, optimising your Google Business Profile is the priority step before tackling the rest. Then go through, one by one, the directories where your company appears and harmonise the name, address and phone number exactly as they read on that reference listing. Semrush offers a method for spotting and correcting existing citations. Once the corrections are live, wait a few weeks for Google to re-crawl those pages, then follow how your local searches move in Google Search Console, filtering by queries containing your town name.
Rule worth remembering: one single version of your identity online. Same spelling, same number format, same address, everywhere your company appears. Google has to recognise the same identity card every time it crosses your path on the web.
Local citations do not replace a complete local SEO strategy; they are one brick among others. For an overview of every lever that determines your visibility against the businesses in your neighbourhood, our complete local SEO guide for small companies goes through each of them in the order to tackle them.