What it actually means.
A citation is any place on the internet where your NAP shows up. The classic example is a directory listing: Yelp, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Foursquare, industry-specific directories. Each one is a citation.
Citations build trust with Google. The more authoritative third-party sites confirm your NAP, the more confident Google becomes that your business exists and is what it claims to be. Citations were one of the earliest ranking factors in local SEO and still carry weight today, though less than they did pre-2015.
Quality matters more than quantity. Twenty citations on real industry directories (lawyers on Avvo, restaurants on OpenTable, contractors on Houzz) outperform 200 citations on spammy aggregator sites. The work is to identify the 30-50 directories that matter for your vertical and your city, then keep them all in sync.
Common mistakes we see.
- Paying for 'citation packages' that build 500 spammy listings. Google ignores them at best, penalizes at worst.
- Never auditing existing citations. Old phone numbers and addresses from previous office locations live on directory sites for years if you don't actively clean them up.