So, in today's video, we're going to do a deep dive into local citations. They're crucial to getting your dispensary to rank at the very top of Google. Citations are a huge part of what Google takes into account when ranking your dispensary over somebody else's. So, not only will I talk about citations, but I'm just going to do a step-by-step guide on how to do citations, how to audit your citations, as well as doing a little bit of recon on your competitor's citations. So, with that being said, let's dive right into the video. Citations are crucial because they are part of prominence, right? They build your business's authority, and prominence is one of the three primary local SEO ranking factors. So, prominence is actually the third one.
Let's say you're close to the customer. They're searching for dispensary near me. You're right there. But how prominent is your business? How much authority does it have? How credible is your business? Google takes that all into account when deciding which businesses to rank over others. So, what a citation is is basically just a listing on other websites besides Google. Listing your website on Yelp, on Facebook, on Yellow Pages, the Better Business Bureau, Weed Maps, Leafly, so on and so forth. So, let's take a look at two scenarios. Let's say we have one business. Sure, they have a Google business profile. Maybe they have a good amount of reviews, so on and so forth.
But Google cannot find them anywhere else. They're not on Yelp. They're not on Facebook. You know, they're not on the Yellow pages. Google's trust that that business actually exists plummets, right? How can they trust a business that has a Google business profile but doesn't exist anywhere else on the web? The same goes for if you have a citation. So maybe you do exist on Yelp and Google and Weed Maps and Leafly and so on and so forth, but your addresses don't match, your phone numbers don't match, the name of the business doesn't match. How is Google going to trust you to make sure that you rank above others, right? Let's say your address is completely different on Yelp than it is on Google. Your phone number is completely different on Facebook than it is on Google. They have less and less trust and less and less certainty that you're a real business that actually exists uh you know that is actually operating. So it's just going to demote you on the Google rankings. So those are citations. That's why they're important. Let's get into how to do citations. The first thing to keep in mind when starting to build out your citations is NAP consistency. Okay, NAP is just an acronym that stands for uh your business name. So N for name, address, A for address, and P for phone number. So those are the primary three things that Google looks at. You have to make sure if you if your business name is listed as, you know, ABC dispensary on Google, it's written the same way on Yelp, it's written the same way on Facebook, uh, you know, Yellow Pages, so on and so forth.
Uh your address, even inconsistencies like spelling Boulevard versus BLVD period can make a difference, right? Your phone number. These are all critical factors to NAP consistency. Ideally, you are listed in tons and tons of citations and your NAP consistency matches perfectly. That's what we're aiming for today. So, if you're just starting off, make sure you start with the core citations, right? So, some of the stuff I've already listed, uh, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, Facebook, Yellow Pages, Better Business Bureau, all of those are core citations that pretty much any business should be on. But then you could take it a step further and go into niche citations. So, if you're a dispensary, obviously you should be on Weed Maps, you should be on Leafly, and there's a ton of other niche directories like that that you could get your business listed on that's just going to help with your Google ranking. If you're looking to beat the competition, we could do a little bit of recon. The way we do that is we go and pick a competitor, right? So, in this case, we have LA Wonderland Marijuana Dispensary Los Angeles. This is the name of their business. Uh, this is obviously the keyword that they're trying to rank for, right? So, they've actually included the keyword as the name of their business.
You're not really supposed to do that with Google, you know, you're just supposed to have the name of your business, like the pottery, but it does help your Google ranking. So if you are going to do it, one way you could be safe about it is register a DBA as this, right? So you might be LA Wonderland, but you also have a DBA as LA Wonderland Marijuana Dispensary Los Angeles, right? You'll be a little safer if you if you go about it that way. But once you have the name, all you have to do is copy that. And Google has a search feature where you can search things in quotes and it's only going to show you websites uh that contain those exact words or phrases. Right? So I can search in quotes LA Wonderland Marijuana Dispensary Los Angeles. And what do I get? I get eight pages of citations that they've put together. They're listed on everywhere from Yelp to goss.com dispensaries.bz. BZ uh local canada.guide next door, right?
California cannabis.org. So, they have both the core citations and the niche citations. So, it looks like they're in a good spot, but I'm also going to show you how to audit them later, so we could see if that's uh, you know, reality or not. This is an example of a dispensary that's not doing any citations, right? So, they're going to consistently rank lower above businesses that have tons of citations. That's just the fact of the matter. So, first of all, I don't agree with the way they put out their name, right? Breezy LA cannabis and weed delivery in Los Angeles. Only online delivery. It's a terrible way to go about it. That's first and foremost. But if we search this in Google in quotes, literally nothing pops up. Their Google business listing pops up, but literally nothing.
Like, when have you seen Google this empty? Right? There's nothing on the left hand side. So, they're not doing a good job at citations. This is an example of what not to do. Now, if you want to audit your citations to make sure that you did a good job, or in this case, we're just going to audit a competitor's citations, uh just click on the link. I'll leave it somewhere below. Moz.com has a free citations checker. Of course, you can sign up for their paid service, and I'm sure it's going to give you more details and more depth, but the free tool works pretty well as well. All you need to do is type in the company name, address, city, state, and the zip code. Right?
So, this is the NAP consistency I'm talking about. This is what they're going to search for to try to find, you know, in all of these directories that they have access to. We click check. Now, it takes a couple minutes. And actually, LA Wonderland marijuana dispensary Los Angeles isn't doing as hot as we thought. So it's showing 70% of citations are missing. Now this is citations that they normally look for right better business bureau, city search, demand force, Facebook forsquare, all of those are missing.
They don't have any of those profiles. They might have done a good job and maybe overextended themselves in the niche citations, right? The weed maps, the leaf leaves, and all of that, but they completely missed out and skipped just the core citations in general. Of course, maza.com is looking at the core citations. They're not looking at niche citations, especially for uh you know, the cannabis industry specifically. So, it's not finding everything, but out of the core citations that it's looking at, they are missing a lot of it. And 30% of them are incomplete. And if you notice here, it even pointed out certain things such as the address and the name being different, right? So, they do have a Bing, but their name on Bing is completely different. Their address doesn't match either. Boulevard here has a has a dot or period. Boulevard here doesn't. The zip code here is only five digits. The zip code here is nine digits. Right? So, all of that leads to inconsistencies.
That's an example of what you don't want to do again. So, if you go to the link, go to Moz, you could audit your citations after you're done building all of them. And you could also export this into a PDF. So, you'll have something to just uh, you know, refer to and make sure you check off all the boxes. So, that's where you start with citations. There's tools that'll help you throughout the process. There's tools that'll help you um, you know, audit the process. There's people you can hire to do citations for you. But that's basically 90% of what you need to know, right? Make sure you build citations both on core citations and your niche citations. Make sure you have NAP consistency. Your name, address, and phone number matches throughout all of those websites. And then audit it. Just make sure that everything is looking up the way you expect it to look. So that's it for today's video. Uh if you guys have any questions, comments, concerns, leave them below. And until next time, I'll catch you guys later. Peace.
