What is Citation Tracker?

Citation Tracker (CT) helps automate the process of finding and auditing your citations, enabling you to quickly see where a business is listed, what data is displayed about the business, and where competitors are listed but your business is not.

For the most important directories (e.g., Yelp, Google, Facebook), the tool performs a full audit of the core business data (NAP) displayed on each key citation, identifying errors and inconsistencies which are then highlighted in red. This allows you to quickly audit a business’s citations without the considerable hours of manual research or messy spreadsheets.

Any gaps in the key citations list indicate opportunities to build new, powerful listings.

Citation Tracker displays a list of all the sites and directories where a business is currently listed. These are known as ‘Live Citations’.

Citation Tracker also identifies your top competitors (based on the top-ranking businesses in your Google Business Profile category) and shows you the sites they're listed on where your business isn't.

Citation Tracker is used by thousands of agencies to audit clients’ digital presences and plan effective strategies. Many customers also use the reports generated to help them educate prospects or clients on their current citation footprint, making it easy to visualize how Google views a business whilst helping the client to understand the value of citation management.

What is a citation?

A citation is an online mention of a business that features the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of the business.

In the context of local search, citations are typically business directory listings such as Yelp, YellowPages.com, and many others. Citations are a foundational ranking factor for local SEO, which means it is essential to get them right in order to improve business visibility online and to potentially influence local rankings.

Citations provide search engines with a digital ‘anchor point’ that gives multiple points of evidence to prove that the business is where it says it is. They also help potential customers find what they’re looking for.

Why are citations important?

Accuracy is one of the most important factors of citations — you need to make sure that the business’s name, address, and phone number are consistent online. Achieving this gives Google (and other search engines) confidence in the true location of a business, ensuring they can accurately place the business on a map.

Having a range of accurate citations also tells search engines that a business is prominent, or well-known, which search engines also use as a factor to determine the influence that a business has in their local results.

There are many different directories a business could (and should) be listed on, but creating these listings and keeping them both updated and consistent is labour-intensive — it’s a very manual task that takes a lot of time researching and well as inputting.