Top 50 Citation Sources For UK & US Local Businesses

Here is a little Christmas gift for all local Citation builders: a carefully curated list of the top 50 Citation Sources for businesses in the US & UK.*

Over 1 Million Local Citation Sources Found

Between March-May 2011, the research team at BrightLocal conducted a huge Citation Analysis project.

Over 480,000 Google Places listings were analyzed across 40 business sectors and 100 locations. The Citation information was extracted into a database of over 1.1 million individual citation sources.

This extensive list was filtered down, removing all brand and business ‘brochure-ware’ sites, leaving a list of 15,000 genuine citation sources.

Some of these sites appeared hundreds of thousands of times within Google’s citation index and are extremely powerful citations opportunities.

In June 2011, Google removed citation content from Google Places profiles and this information is now hidden forever (publicly anyway).

Citations Are Crucial To Effective Google Places Ranking

While these citation domains may no longer be visible their impact on Google Places ranking remains as important as ever. The following Chart shows the top 5 ranking factors from the 2011 Local Search Ranking Factors survey.

Chart 1 – 2011 Local Search Ranking Factors – ‘Significance of Citations’

Quantity of Citations is considered the 4th most important SEO factor for Local Search ranking.

**Source – 2011 Local Search Ranking Factor Survey – Mihmorandum

Top 50 Citation Sources & Some Extra Juicy Information

These two tables show the top 50 Citation Sources for US and UK markets. (Note:*Google removed citation data from Google Places before citation data cold be gathered for other countries. )

The Frequency Count shows the number of times each domain was identified on the 480,000 GP listings analyzed; some domains were found multiple times per GP listing.

To make them this citation list even more useful, I have included extra data such as Type of Site and whether each site offers a Free or Paid Listing (or no listing at all). This data was gathered by the BrightLocal research team to supplement the data held on these 15,000 Citation Sources.

Top 50 US Citation Sources

Table 1 - Top 50 US Citations

Top 50 UK Citation Sources

You can download a full copy of the tables above in Excel format here.

3 Useful Tools To Help With Your Citation Building

**For purposes of full disclosure – I am the Founder of BrightLocal and therefore biased in favor of BrightLocal’s tools.

Merry Christmas one and all!!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Local Search

9 Comments on Top 50 Citation Sources For UK & US Local Businesses

JVRudnick, December 19th, 2011 at 3:51 pm ET:

Boy..great listing and very good-to-know…sigh….but in ONLY you’d included Canada in your stats too…would have helped us Canuck SEO types immensely, eh!

:-(

Jim

Gyi Tsakalakis, December 19th, 2011 at 4:05 pm ET:
Premium member since 08/2010

Myles,

Cool. Thanks for this. BrightLocal puts out some excellent stuff on local. One resource to add GetListed.org.

My two cents, SMBs should really focus on local and hyper local niche citation sites.

Best,

Gyi

Joe Woods, December 19th, 2011 at 7:57 pm ET:

Awesome list and date. Thanks for sharing. Is there anyway to get this in an excel version?

Myles Anderson, December 19th, 2011 at 8:17 pm ET:

Hi Joe

You can download the excel from the brightlocal site. There is a link just below the 2nd table in the article which says – ‘You can download a full copy of the tables above in Excel format here.’

@JVRudnick – we wish we had this data for Canada too! (and Australia and every other country!)

Thanks to all

Lloyd Herrera, December 20th, 2011 at 12:37 am ET:

This is absolutely amazing. It will helps a lot on my local rankings. I hope Australia will have too..

Adrian Bold, December 20th, 2011 at 2:44 am ET:

Thank you so much for sharing this research. Really appreciated! :-)

Nick Rink, December 20th, 2011 at 3:47 am ET:

Nice article with some great info. Have been trying out CitationTracker and have found it to be a really useful tool for clients here in the UK.

Myles Anderson, December 20th, 2011 at 6:35 am ET:

@All – glad that this data is helpful.

@Nick – great to know that you’re enjoying CitationTracker. We will be adding some extra features and training videos soon to help SEOs get the most from it

Best wishes

David GS, December 20th, 2011 at 4:44 pm ET:

We use Bright Local and they are a fantastic resource. In response to JVRudnick we also compiled a list of Canadian specific citations (using BrightLocal data). Hopefully this link will help – http://www.localtrifecta.com/2011/08/canadian-citations-local-search/

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