Using the Local Citation Finder

The local citation finder is a great little tool for improving your local SEO rankings, and we just launched the new "pro" version which has lots of great stuff. I thought I'd take a minute to show you how the LCF can help you.

What It Does For You

The LCF follows the process outlined in Garrett French's Phone Number Co-Citation Analysis for Local Link Builders article. Basically, for any local search query (ie. "edmonton greek food") it:

Gathers the phone numbers of the top ranking sites
Performs a search for each of those phone numbers
Finds all citation sources which list the top ranking sites

'edmonton greek food' search results

Look at all of those juicy sources, just waiting for you to submit your site.

Now it's super simple to start plowing through that list, and building citations for your business. Click the "submit your business" link, enter your site info, and start improving your rankings. So easy!

Go Pro!

If you're really determined to dominate local search, we've added a few pro features to make it a little easier.

First and foremost: all pro searches go straight to the "pro" queue, which is way faster.

Second, you can sort citations by Majestic SEO AC Rank, and SEOmoz Domain Authority.

Sort results

This is super handy if you're looking to evaluate the quality of a citation source. Now you can optimize your time by going after the citations that will offer you the most bang for your buck.

Third, we make it super easy to export our results as a CSV so that you can use them however you wish.

Saving the Best for Last

Why is my business ranking #3? Or, not at all? It's a tough question to answer.

Well, not only can you view all of the citations that all of the top sites have, but you can also run a direct comparison to see which citations the #1 and #2 site have that your missing.

compare your citations with your competitors

Just run a phone number search for your business, and each of your competitors, then compare. Now you know what you're missing, and you can take action to fix it!

But Wait, There's More!

We've still got a few tricks up our sleeves. Coming soon for Pro users:

Personalized Results
Results will automatically mark citations you already have.
Expanded Results
Searching beyond 100 sources per phone number to find all citations.
More Comprehensive Search
Citations also pulled from Google's "More About This Place" and compared to the phone number results.
More Sources
New query types to find additional local citation sources like blogs, newspapers, magazines, and local websites.

If you haven't tried, go sign up for the local citation finder right now. There's a free demo version! Get crackin'!

Kiwi - February 09, 2011:

Looks good guys, I have my main top 20 citation sites I use but this will help me expand this for total local domination.

Doc Sheldon - February 09, 2011:

Congrats, guys! Another homerun!

rob - February 09, 2011:

Seems interesting. Does this tool exclusively seek microformatted sites?

carlos - February 09, 2011:

just stumbled here via an email sent to me. i have never used information like this before.

is it possible to see a video showing not only how the system works?...but how it solves the problem of improving rankings.

Patrick Tuttle - February 09, 2011:

can we white label the product?

http://www.web-marketing-conce[ts.com

larry diesbach - February 09, 2011:

I think this will be amazing, I agree a white label of this would be nice.

Bachman Auto Glass
1023 Glengarry Dr
Wentzville, MO 63385
(636)939-6946

linda spector - February 09, 2011:

will this work in uk?
lind

Johan Venables - February 09, 2011:

Is this available for south africa

Jefferson - February 09, 2011:

It works for Brazil ?

Darren Shaw http://www.whitespark.ca - February 10, 2011:

Rob: No, it doesn't even consider microformatted sites.

Carlos: Yeah, we are planning to put a video together.

Patrick & Larry: Pro accounts can export the data to CSV and present the data that way to their clients. Is that what you mean?

Linda: Yes, we support the UK

Johan: South Africa coming soon!

Jefferson: Yes, we support Brazil.

Tom - February 10, 2011:

Its not good for UK results, our mastermind group tested it out and we all word in local search. If you guys (whitspark) want to get back to me about tweaking this thing for UK theres some sales in it for you for sure. T

Mark - February 10, 2011:

I'll second that UK request !

Darren Shaw - February 10, 2011:

Hi Tom and Don,

We do support UK, and in all our testing, it has worked perfectly. We process hundreds of UK based searches a day, and they're all returning big lists of citation sources.

One thing that is confusing with the tool is the "choose your search engine" dropdown. You must change this to google.co.uk for UK based searches. We realize that this isn't clear, so we're changing the field to be "Country" instead, and making it required.

If you're not getting results, then chances are you maybe left the engine as google.com.

Brandon - February 11, 2011:

Just curious, but how do you think it compares with http://getlisted.org?

Jim Jackson http://www.askhiphop.com - February 11, 2011:

I just signed up for your pro service, the quicker results returns are great.

I have one recommendation though. When comparing companies after searching by phone number, it would be nice to be able to group by project, especially for those of us working on multiple local accounts.

Great product!

Darren Shaw - February 12, 2011:

@Brandon It's pretty different from GetListed. You can't really compare the two.

@Jim That's a great suggestion. I think we could build it so you can create projects, then assign search results to projects. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi Tom,

I took a look at your account, and I see that you did use co.uk in your searches. To test, I ran the same searches you did, and I'm getting a nice looking list of over 600 citation sources for each term. Can you please let us know what happened with your searches? Not sure why you wouldn't get the same results that I did.

Email me at info@whitespark.ca.

Thanks

Darren

jim http://www.southfloridamobiledetailing.com - March 07, 2011:

Thanks for adding the ability to sort searches by project, but I see there is a 5 project limit.

Is there going to be an option to increase that limit beyond 5 projects?

Darren Shaw - February 24, 2011:

@Simon the citation sources are aggregated by domain. So, just one column per source.

Simon http://LocalBusinessInternetPro.com - February 18, 2011:

Quick question. Where you are able to compare sites, in a grid, to the citations the #1 & #2 sites have, are the citations aggregated by domain, or is there a danger that you get multiple columns from the same citation source?

Bill Davidson - July 26, 2011:

Any thoughts on doing an API for this?

Tayloredideas http://www.tayloredideas.com - September 27, 2012:

It is one of the greatest tool that I found to increase my local visibility.

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