This is one of the toughest parts of managing a citation campaign – not because the process is difficult compared to the other, but mainly because the results are in the hands of the citation sites. 

Why is that so? Some citation sites take time before responding to a request regardless of the countless email outreach that you sent them. So you have to be resourceful on how to contact them, which is included below on this guide.

You will also encounter sites that didn’t provide contact information as well as for instructions on how to edit your business profile. Some citation sites use external sources of data that they display on their directory. Just like how Local.com and Yellowpages distribute data from their network sites.

Below are some of the guidelines and process we use during a citation cleanup campaign:

Create You Email Outreach Account

Using a free email account is fine, but we highly recommend using a domain name email. The reason is that when sending an email to citation site owners, they are more likely to respond to the requests coming from the domain emails. 

There are cases where we used a Gmail account and the site where we sent an outreach email called the business phone number to verify if we are connected to the business. This might happen to your campaign during citation cleanup.

Prepare Your Outreach Template

I would suggest creating a different outreach template per citation cleanup campaign to avoid getting marked as spam because of the same format of the email that other citation sites are receiving. Below is an example of an outreach email template that you may use:

Hey {First Name}

I am Gerry, a local marketer that represents {Business Name}. We are tasked with managing their online profiles and we found out that our business information is listed incorrectly in your directory. 

Can you please assist us in editing this profile {Profile URL}?

The correct information is as followed:

Business Name {Correct Business Name}
Business Address {Correct Address}
Business Phone {Correct Phone}
Website URL {Website URL}

Let me know if you can update it for us. 

Regards,

Gerry

Starts with the Source

Always start the actual cleanup campaign on the source of the data. The source could be a government site, data aggregators, phone companies, etc. These trusted sources are usually used by citation sites for their directory. 

Cleaning the citation profile directly might result in reverting to the old version, which is based on the data of the source. And in some cases, citation sites will respond that they can’t update the profile and will point you to the actual source.

Clean The Popular Citation Sites

Like the other instructions in the citation building campaign, always start your campaign with the top sites. The reason is that these popular sites commonly have a great number of visitors daily that can see your business’s incorrect information.

Do Not Settle With Email Outreach

Sending an email is the simplest way to do the citation cleanup. Once you have the contact email address and outreach template set up, you can fire the email right away and wait for the sites to respond so that they will update your profile. 

Other ways to update the citation are: look for report incorrect information links, contacting them via social media sites, contact form, claiming the business profile, or call the site.

Schedule Your Check and Follow-up

Some citation sites will not respond right away, and it is good to set up a day where you can check the results of your campaign and schedule another attempt to clean up your citation in case the first attempt failed. For example, in our team, we do weekly results checking and a weekly cleanup campaign. 

Record Your Campaign Activity and Results

It would be best to record the list of citations that you are trying to clean. The list must also include the date where attempts were made, and the process you used on that attempt. The reason is that we want to identify if that process gave us good results. For example, we did an email outreach on the first attempt, and we sent an email to a specific account, however, we should also consider doing other options like contacting them on social media, calling them, or maybe search for another contact email address.

Conclusion

Local Citation is still one of the best ranking factors for a local search campaign and one of the affordable local SEO services. It is still one of the data from SEO surveys that search engines use in their search algorithms. But for it to work for your business, you must ensure the quality of the citation sites, the right way of building citations, and the accuracy of your business information.