What are local citations and do they still matter?
Local SEO — answered straight, by an operator who builds these systems rather than an agency selling them.
A citation is any listing of your business name, address, and phone number on another site — directories, chambers, review platforms, data aggregators. They still matter, mostly as consistency signals. What hurts is contradiction: three different phone numbers across the web makes every source less trustworthy.
The longer version
The value has shifted from quantity to cleanup. Building 300 new listings does little; fixing the old listing with your former address, the duplicate profile from a rebrand, and the aggregator record with a dead phone number does a lot.
Priority order is boring and effective: Google first, then Apple Maps and Bing Places, then the big aggregators, then the directories specific to your trade. Get those consistent and the long tail mostly sorts itself out.
More on local seo
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