Getting your business listed everywhere it should be, all at once

What counts as a citation

A citation is any online mention of your business's name, address and phone number — often shortened to NAP — whether or not it links back to your website. That includes obvious places like Google Business Profile and major directories, but also industry-specific listings, local chamber of commerce sites, and even some social platforms. Google treats each consistent mention as a small vote of confidence that your business is real, established and located where you say it is.

Why NAP consistency matters so much

If your business name, address or phone number is written slightly differently across different sites — a shortened street name here, an old phone number there, 'Ltd' on one listing and not another — Google has to work harder to confirm these all refer to the same business. Enough inconsistency can quietly undermine trust and hold back local rankings, even if each individual listing looks fine on its own. Consistency, on the other hand, reinforces exactly the same signal every time it appears.

Structured vs unstructured citations

Structured citations are the ones you'd expect — clearly labelled directory listings with dedicated fields for name, address and phone number. Unstructured citations are mentions that appear naturally in text, like a local news article or blog post referencing your business, without a formal listing format. Both count, but structured citations are far easier to audit and correct at scale, which is why a citation burst focuses on getting those live and consistent first.

How citation bursts differ from slow ongoing building

Building citations one at a time, a few a month, is how most agencies approach it — and it works, eventually. A burst instead gets a large batch of consistent, accurate listings live together in a short window, which tends to produce a more noticeable shift in local visibility than the same number trickling out over six months. After the burst, we monitor for anything that drifts out of sync — a listing that gets edited incorrectly, or a duplicate that appears — rather than leaving it unmanaged.

Common citation mistakes that hurt rankings

The most common issues are duplicate listings created by different people or agencies over the years, listings left over from a previous address or phone number, and directories where the category or business description no longer matches what the business actually does. These aren't always obvious from the outside — a business can look fine on Google while having several conflicting listings sitting in directories nobody's checked in years. That's exactly what the audit stage of a citation burst is built to catch.

How we choose which directories to prioritise

Not all directories are equal, and simply maximising the number of listings isn't the goal. We prioritise a mix of major, well-established general directories that Google clearly trusts, alongside industry-specific and local directories that are genuinely relevant to your trade and area. A handful of relevant, high-quality listings tends to do more for rankings than dozens of low-quality, rarely-used ones — so part of the audit is deciding where citations are actually worth building, not just where it's possible to build one.