Usually, when we talk about SEO, we recommend patience, following best practices, and more patience - which can be frustrating, especially for action-oriented business owners!
This step isn’t like that.
We’ll show you how to find extra citation websites where your all-important NAP - Name, Address, and Phone Number - can be fixed or added to help your SEO!
If you haven’t seen our Ultimate Guide to Self Storage SEO, I recommend checking that out, as it will help you understand why the trick we’re covering here helps you.
In this blog, we’ll show you how to use Semrush’s Listing Management Tool to find places your business is cited online. Inaccurate citations can really drag your SEO down because if Google (and other search engines) aren’t sure which address is right, it won’t show your business in search results at all!
You can also build easy backlinks to your site, which potentially increases your SEO strength!
Using the tool is easy:
For more information, read on!
This is a helpful little SEO tool that searches the internet for places your business is mentioned!
It will search a whole host of citation websites (think the YellowPages) for your business and show you the most prominent results. It will categorize the results as “missed opportunities,” “incorrect information,” or “issues not found,” the latter of which means your business is already listed correctly.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of citation websites, but it’s a great place to start. Semrush will even tell you how many visitors these websites have on average so you can prioritize which ones to fix first!
Simply put your business’s name into the search bar, choose the one that is actually you, and press search. Be sure you’ve chosen the business that matches your address - you’d be surprised how many businesses share a name with another one in a different state!
That’s one of the big benefits of this tool - it’ll help you clarify which business is actually yours, and it’ll show you anywhere on the internet that might have you confused with a different business.
This tool gives you a way to find incorrect or missing citations, which you can then correct or add.
The first, most obvious way this helps your SEO is that adding your business to these listing sites will provide you with backlinks. Backlinks are an important ranking factor in SEO, and these are easy opportunities to grab some.
More importantly, you may find some customers through these citation pages. With the lifetime value of the average self storage customer being near $1000, any extra visitors to your website are worth a lot.
These sites aren’t the same as the self storage aggregators you may be thinking of - these citation sites are mostly trying to make money off of ads on their site, not by referring leads to you (and charging you for them).
Instead, they’ll just provide you as an option when people use their site to search for self storage in the area. Increasing your visibility in this way will almost always be helpful, because these sites clearly do enough business to keep existing. You may as well take advantage of them!
The best reason to update your citations, though, is to give extra weight to your correct NAP!
Your Name, Address, and Phone, or NAP, is an important ranking factor for local SEO. Search engines won’t show your business as an option if you have incorrect information out there!
That’s the most important reason to use this tool. If your business has been around for a while, it’s entirely possible that your old phone number (remember that time ten years ago when you swapped carriers?) still exists somewhere!
If you feel like you’re not ranking where you should, incorrect NAP could be the problem.
First, follow this link to the Semrush Listing Management Tool.
Then, put your business name in the search bar - be sure that you’ve chosen the right one, checking the address against your own.
Press the search button - the listing management tool will scour the internet for places your business is listed, then check the information against your Google Business Profile. It will list whether or not your listing is missing from a given site, incorrect compared to your GBP, or fine.
You can then take that list and start updating your citations!
Prioritize fixing incorrect listings!
These are the most valuable bits of information the tool provides - if you’ve got time, though, you can put your information on the citation websites too.
One caveat - these backlinks may increase your SEO strength, but it’s entirely possible that you don’t see much change when you fix them. The big benefit comes from fixing any incorrect Name, Address, and Phone listings, but the backlinks won’t hurt.
If your customer base uses these listings, you’ll get a bigger SEO boost, because Google (and others) value clicks that come from your backlinks. If no one uses the backlinks referring to your website, you won’t necessarily rank higher.
This is because of the way search engines distribute value. Even though these large citation websites have a lot of traffic, they also have a TON of links - so the value of each link is generally low.
However, if you find an incorrect NAP in a few places? That’s worth a hundred times the minutes you’ll spend fixing it!
For more information on fixing up your SEO, check out our Ultimate Guide!
Interested in learning more about self storage SEO? Check out some of these great resources!
