If you want your business to grow in today’s world, you can’t do it without stepping into the world of SEO. Especially if you are targeting the local market. With the increase in the reach of the internet to various demographics, people are now looking for shops to eat, to dine, and for various activities on search engines. Without the help of search engines, you are losing a very good opportunity to drive in more customers and make more money.
When it comes to local SEO, citations play a very important role in it. If you aren’t sure what citations really are, here is a short glimpse into it.
Basically, a citation is the mention of your local business on another website usually in the form of a link. It generally consists of your business’s address, phone number, and name. Good quality and a good quantity of citations will help you achieve success in the search engines.
Citation has got the utmost importance in local SEO. It helps you substantially to rank in search engines. Moreover, potential people will possibly search for your business online before trying out your products, so it’s important to keep your image on the internet positive and citation helps you greatly to achieve that.
But citation building is a really tedious task. Building up citations will end up taking lots of precious hours. Though you can build citations for your business on Yelp and Yellow Pages without much effort, the time involved in it is just too much.
Here comes, WhiteSpark to the rescue.
WhiteSpark basically helps you (greatly) in two ways–firstly, with the help of the search and compare feature, you can easily set up a base for building further citations. Secondly, it also comes with a re-run feature which will help you to know whether the citation has been completed (or not). You don’t need to search for citations in search engines or by sneaking on your competitor, WhiteSpark is an all-in-one solution for your woes.
Getting Started with the Tool
First things first, make an account on the website. You have five plans to choose from, which are–free, small business, SEO specialist, SEO agency, and SEO enterprise. Each plan has its very own set of features to attract various types of folks with different needs.
I would suggest you not go for the free version, as you won’t find anything great with the free version. Unless you buy any of their plans, you won’t get the real potential of the tool. If you are going to use the tool for yourself, a small business plan would be enough for you. If you are running an SEO freelancing service, it would be better if you go for the SEO agency plan. If you have working for dozens of clients at once, then you should look nowhere else than the SEO enterprise plan.
Also, you would have to pay less for each of the plans annually than monthly. For example, for a small business, if you choose to pay annually, then you have to directly pay 16.67$ per month. Whereas for the monthly payment, you have to pay 20$ per month.
The Main Task: Finding Citations
Finding citations is extremely easy. It is extremely easy to use and user-friendly which leads me to think–does anybody contact the support team or not?!
Once you open it, you have to put forward a keyword for example ‘restaurants’ and an area, such as ‘Florida’. Hit the run button, and you will be greeted with a list of results. Otherwise, you can even run an analysis test on your competitors and find out what they are using. Isn’t it great? The results are quite varying, you might end up getting 10-15 results on some specific terms and 90-100 on some others.
Pros
- Saves a lot of time as you don’t have to search for each citation manually.
- Helps you to know what your competitors are using, especially the top guns.
- It also integrates SEOMoz DA and Majestic SEO Rank for finding quality citations on the web.
Cons
- There are rarely any cons to it, with the only negative point being the limited number of searches for each plan.
In the end, I would like to say that it’s a must-have tool. With plans starting from 20$ per month (16.67$ otherwise), it is a bang for the buck!
Waiting for what? Here’s your must-have tool: WhiteSpark.
