Which holds more weight..Citations or Social?

[satoridesign]

If a client has budget constraints, would it help local rank more if we placed emphasis on building out a couple citations each month for them or boosting their social posting frequency? Does one carry more weight?

[BrightHealth]

If they are looking for local leads, go directly to building Citations. Social mentions will do very little to help with Google local rankings. Realistically, unless it is a metro area and you dedicate a lot of time & energy towards social, your efforts will not be show adequate ROI.

Why Citations are Important:

• https://getlisted.org/static/resources/why-citations-are-important.html

[satoridesign]

Thanks man! I was kinda thinking the same thing. I heard a statistic a while back about how many tweets it takes to actually start influencing and the number was crazy big.

[TheeDigital]

I agree with Spyder, but I also want to ask what is the goal of the client.  Do they want to rank well?  If that's the case cituations might be the way to go, but if they offer a cool service or have some form of content that you can use you might want to think about social.

[satoridesign]

Well they do Junk Removal. Competeing against big guys like 1800 Got Junk. I mean they do social, but barely. Like 4.16 tweets/mo and 2.3 FB posts/mo so far this year. As for citations they just did a blast on Yext and thats it! Right now they really need to do some onsite work and some link building from what I gather.

[MoosaHemani]

When the target is ranking and the option is between social and citation... I would always choose citation as this might not directly help you with conversions but obviously van help you grow your local rankings for multiple key phrases.

If the primary need is conversion then I would say use powerful and effective social strategy as this will convert visitors in to leads!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Scott,

While both forms of marketing are important, I agree with members' suggestions that citations should receive first focus. You might try to imagine a Local Search Marketing plan in this order:

On-page optimization===>Local Listings===>Ongoing content publication===>Reviews===>Social===>Linkbuilding===>Video

The last 3 items on that list may be optional, depending on how competitive the client's niche is. Everything on the list is important, but what you must do for each client will vary based on their unique level of competition.

[satoridesign]

Thanks everyone! What a great community, so glad I joined;)

[MiriamEllis]

And we are so glad to have you, Scott! A very warm welcome!