Google Places Citations site at the bottom of your Google page under the very heading ‘More about this place’, they display other websites that have mentioned your business may also include directory listings, news stories as well as articles. Citations aren’t something that you can add to your page yourself, Google adds them to your listing as it crawls the web. When Google does find a citation or reference to your site which you receive a point, you need to obtain even if that site fails to link directly to you. The higher the number of points, the higher you will rank. Google also recognizes the very combination of factors like business name, address, phone number as well as several others as citation.

Citations do act as a vote of confidence within your listing, thus citations from authoritative sites are worth more than less authoritative ones, for example, a link from your local Chambers of Commerce. It eventually means that quality is far more crucial than volume. Having citations have a positive effect on your Google Places ranking and must be considered a crucial element of your local SEO campaign.

There are several varied things which you do to influence which sites offer citations which Google can index. One of the major ways for checking out the competition, you need to look out at those listings that rank highly for your search terms. You can make a note of their citation sources. After that, you can visit the sites and see if you can get a citation. It will eventually help, but if you simply copy the competition, then how will you beat them when everything is same. You have to go above and beyond. After that, you need to identify local industry relevant as well as authoritative sites which are likely to link to your site. You can approach the owner as well as request a review or listing on their site.