What are local SEO citations?

Put simply, a citation for local SEO is reference to a company’s Name, Address and Phone number (NAP in local SEO parlance) from a web page that Google knows and trusts. This is often from online databases such as Yelp or BBB, but can be from just about anywhere, really.

Google uses these citations to determine the relative importance of a company. In short, the more citations you have, and the more important those site’s making the citation are, the more important the company is seen.

The importance of a company is used, along with location and topical relevance, to determine rankings in Google against all the other business listings.

A citation need not have an accompanying link, but it certainly won’t hurt.