Local Citations are any online mention of your law firm’s details, name, address, URL, and phone number. What are their purposes, and how can your law firm benefit from a solid local citations strategy? 

Localization and geotargeting are critical components of every law firm’s digital marketing strategy. Multiple factors can influence an Attorney’s local digital presence, including reputation management, content strategy, and transcreation techniques for bilingual content. One of the most prominent factors, next to the ones mentioned above, is local citations. They are your law firm’s mentions on any online platform. They can affect your discoverability and the way that search engines crawl and rank your legal website. In this article, we’ll explore their different forms, their value to your legal digital marketing, and the different types of local citations.

Let’s start by identifying the major components of local citations:

  1. Business category
  2. Phone number and fax number if applicable
  3. URL
  4. Email address
  5. Business description
  6. Images/videos
  7. Reviews
  8. Driving directions and coordinates
  9. Hours of operation
  10. Payment terms
  11. Links to social platforms and other media

Now that you have a general understanding of local citations, let’s move forward with their different types.

  • Major Platforms

It all starts with Google, and more precisely, your law firm’s listing on Google My Business. It’s the most fundamental asset for any local business, for every law firm. You want to make sure that you utilize every tool the GMB offers you. From that point on, we find all the other major platforms, including Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Yahoo!*, Apple Maps, Instagram, and Bing.

  • Industry-Specific Platforms

In addition to all major platforms, that are of general interest for any business category, you will find other local business platforms, that are industry-specific to law firms. Some of them are Avvo, SuperLawyers, and Justia. On these platforms, you can also add specific attributes related to your law firms, such as practice areas, experience, and achievements.

  • Location-Specific Platforms

As you can understand directly by the title, this category includes any local platform where you can find information about your law firm. They can be either generic or industry-specific.

  • Language-Specific Platforms

Are you investing in Hispanic digital marketing for your law firm? It’s important to know that there are platforms and directories in for Latinx, where you can add your details in Spanish. Such platforms are abogado.com or elclasificado.com.

  • Why do we care about local citations?
  1. Local citations can have an impact (positive or negative) on your law firn’s local SEO performance. You should keep in mind that their quality and quantity matter. Making sure that you have your law firm listed on all major platforms is the first step, but this isn’t enough. All your citations have to be accurate and share the same details. Google, and other search engines, gather all available data and attribute higher trust to businesses that show accurate information on every website they appear. It means that your law firm can get increased chances to rank higher in the SERPs.
  2. Local citations can positively or negatively affect your prospective clients. An inaccurate citation can be misleading; imagine, for example, that you change your law firm’s phone number, and you forget to edit it on one or more websites that you appear. Apart from the negative effect on your legal SEO, it might impact the searcher who will end up calling a different number.

Remember: Don’t forget your website, all the information you share on it has to be precise and accurate.

  • The Two Approaches to citation management.
  1. Passive Approach

It means that you don’t actively pursue local citations, you rely on automatic crawling that sometimes happens, and you don’t have a strategy in place to list, claim, and monitor your law firm’s citations.

  1. Active Approach

You understand the value of local citations to your law firm, and you don’t rely on luck and external factors for your success.

Our approach: We value citation management, and that’s why we make sure to offer the best available services to our clients. We utilize Yext to ensure that all your business information is accurate. That way, we help you increase your digital performance by capturing, converting, and retaining more clients. We help you increase your operational efficiency, as we take care of all date discrepancies, and we minimize any manual work. We help you offer a consistent customer experience to all your searchers, and finally, we help you achieve better organic ranking for your law firm.

It’s time for our key takeaways:

  • Citations represent your law firm’s data that is shared across the Internet.
  • They can influence your organic results and your prospective clients’ experience.
  • Following a passive approach can harm your law firm’s overall digital performance, so it’s important to research your options and come up with a solid plan for your citation management.
  • We are actively helping law firms with citations management, ensuring that all their data is accurate and they don’t need to manually create and monitor their local citations.