Which citations actually matter, and which are a waste of an afternoon
Search for a citation building service and you'll be offered three hundred submissions for a fixed fee. Somebody will build you a spreadsheet with three hundred rows and tick them off.
Most of those rows are worthless. Some are worse than worthless.
The useful set is short, and the genuinely valuable ones aren't on anybody's standard list because they're different for every business.
The ten that carry real weight
These are the ones worth doing properly before anything else, roughly in order:
- Google Business Profile. Not really a citation — it's the entity itself. Everything else exists to corroborate it.
- Bing Places. Feeds Bing Maps and, increasingly, AI assistants that use Bing's index.
- Apple Business Connect. Every iPhone user asking Siri or Apple Maps for a nearby business. Consistently the most-forgotten of the majors.
- Facebook. High visibility, frequently the second result for a brand-name search.
- Yelp. Worth doing even in verticals where Yelp is irrelevant, because it ranks for brand searches and feeds other platforms.
- Better Business Bureau. Carries genuine trust signal in the US, particularly for home services and trades.
- Nextdoor. Increasingly where local recommendation actually happens.
- LinkedIn company page. Low local value, but it ranks for brand queries and costs ten minutes.
- Yellow Pages. Diminished, but still indexed and still feeding smaller aggregators.
- Foursquare. Punches above its visibility because its data flows into other products.
That's it. That's the general-purpose list. Anything beyond it has to earn its place.
The ones worth more than all of them
Here's what the three-hundred-submission services can't sell you, because it requires knowing the business.
Chambers of commerce. A local chamber listing is a real link from a real regional site that Google understands as locally authoritative. It costs a membership fee the client may already be paying.
Trade associations. Every trade has them. A licensed electrician's association, a restaurant association, a regional builders' body. These are membership-gated, which is exactly what makes them valuable — spam can't get in.
Manufacturer and supplier locators. This is the one people miss. If your client installs a particular brand of equipment, that manufacturer very likely has a "find a certified installer" page. It's a high-authority link, it drives actual referral traffic, and your client usually qualifies for it already without knowing.
Local sponsorships. A junior football team, a school fundraiser, a village fete. Real relationships that produce real links, and they're not on any list you can buy.
Local press and community sites. Harder, slower, worth more.
Four of these five are things your client can obtain and a competitor's agency can't fake. How to actually find and land them is its own job.
How to spot a directory that isn't worth it
You can usually tell in thirty seconds:
- Would a human ever use it to find a business? If the only visitors are people submitting listings, search engines have noticed that too.
- Does it accept anything? No verification, no editorial standard, instant approval. A directory that will list anyone is telling you what a listing there means.
- Is it a network? Two hundred sites with the same template and different domains is one signal, not two hundred.
- Does it charge for a dofollow link? That's a paid link with extra steps, and it's an explicit violation of Google's guidelines.
The last one matters. Low-quality directories rarely help, but paid low-quality directories can actively hurt.
Nofollow doesn't disqualify a citation
Most major directories mark their outbound links nofollow, and this worries people more than it should. Yelp, Facebook and BBB all do.
They're still worth having, for reasons that have nothing to do with link equity. That's a longer argument, and it's here.
Complete beats numerous
One more thing, and it's the part most citation work gets backwards.
A fully filled-in listing on a mid-tier directory is worth more than a bare one on a good directory. Categories, hours, description, photos, services, payment methods — these are what a directory uses to decide whether your client answers a given search, and the category is the one that carries the most weight, and what search engines read as corroboration.
Before building anything new, it's worth finding what the business already has — most clients arrive with more citations than anyone remembers.
Submitting a name, address and phone to two hundred sites produces two hundred thin records. Filling in ten properly produces ten pieces of evidence that this business is real and is what it says it is.
Which is why the tedious part isn't the submitting. It's having the answers to hand — the exact name, the exact address format, a 250-character description, the primary category, the hours — so that filling in each form takes thirty seconds instead of six minutes of hunting.
Placemark holds that record once and gives it back to you field by field, so the ten that matter actually get done properly. Free for one business.