Interlinking Local Citations using Yoast Schema

For Local SEO citations are still very important to local SEO. This is because there are 3 main factors which Google will use to index and populate local search results

1. Relevance – the local business needs to be both relevant to the searchers intent and local (geo-relevant)
2. Proximity / Distance – how close is the business to the searchers location
3. Prominence – how well is the brand established online. The search engines rank the prominence of a brand based on information from across the web – links, articles and directories.

Prominence of a business is directly impacted by the total number of brand documents that exist – the more documents (articles, directory listings, reviews and links) you have, the higher the prominence rating will be. This why local SEO needs to include a Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) strategy to create and manage these entities

Local business Citations – directory listings, reviews, press releases are a solid way to build your prominence, but as with all things SEO, the “good old days” of any link will do, are gone. Marketing agencies creating thousands of listings on spammy junk sites are not helping at all – Google AI will root out and ignore brand documents from low quality sites – it doesn’t count citations that have not been indexed.

How do I get my citation listings indexed?

Encourage the search engines to index your citation listings using the following methods

• Add Indexable citations to a page on your website
• Add citations in your organization schema- SameAs – use the snippet below to add to Yoast WordPress SEO schema on your site
• Add Indexable citations to the bottom of YouTube Video Description

Adding Citations to Yoast WordPress SEO schema

Yoast WordPress SEO 12.1 included a new filter – wpseo_schema_organization_social_profiles to filter an organization’s social profiles in the schema output. You can use this filter to modify social profiles (sameAs attribute) in the Organization schema object.

Note: you don’t have to use this just for adding social profiles – any websites you are associated with can be included

Interlinking your citations can be further enhanced by adding a list of follow links to all your business citations on a page on your website.