Citation Quantity vs Real Links

[rswhtn]

Hi Everyone, I've got a question about citations. My website is in a niche where there are 3 main competitors - ourselves and two other sites.

We have around 300 citation links and around 50 high quality links within our niche from people like bloggers, editorial links within news sites etc.

The other two competitors have 900 and 2000 citations each, but nothing else. None of the high quality links we have worked hard over the past year to get.

We're generally ranking lower than the other two sites. Should we focus on getting more citations to "catch up"? Until now we haven't because we've been worried a lot of the citations our other competitors are on look spammy, but it seems whatever we do we can't beat them. On the face of it though, we are a better company with a better site and we've got more/better real links, so I'm starting to wonder if citations are holding us back.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi! When you say citations, what kind of thing are you referring to? Mostly sites in your local area? Online directories like Manta?

[rswhtn]

Hey, thanks for the reply. When I say citations I mean we have our link on location based directories across the country.

Our competitors seem to have directory citations both across the UK (like us) but also across the world, on sites which look very spammy, which is why we have avoided doing them previously.

I've just taken a look at Manta and that looks similar to what we have our listing on, however they're UK based rather than US based. An example of a directory we're on is https://www.yell.com/

We're on around 300 of these, with around 50 links ranging from national newspapers to bloggers - all editorial. The competition don't have any of those and the "quality over quantity" idea doesn't seem to be working for us! The competition have around 900 and 2000 links respectively, all directories, and no real editorial links.

[RuthBurrReedy]

I'd recommend continuing to try to build higher-quality links, rather than pursuing lower-quality directory listings. It's likely that a lot of these lower-quality citations aren't doing anything for your competitors, and the risk of a link penalty from such a strategy is pretty high. Are you reasonably sure that the citation links are the reason they're ranking higher (to the extent that anyone can be sure about why a page is ranking)? Like I said, I'd bet a lot of those citations aren't having much effect on your competitors' sites, as directory listings tend to be devalued by Google pretty quickly. Are there other areas you could try to outdo them - content quality, featured snippets, user experience - to make up some of that ground?

I know it's frustrating to rank lower than people who are being spammy, and high-quality link earning takes time, but that's what I'd advocate doing.

[rswhtn]

Thanks Ruth, that all makes sense and the reason for our quality over quantity approach so far has been because we're committed to white hat techniques which will give us lasting results.

As far as we see it, our website looks better than the competition, we have higher quality content and articles, we have higher quality backlinks, a better ahrefs rank (although understand this isn't a google metric). The only difference we can see, is the fact that we have less links. We're committed to building more authority to the site via high quality editorial links, however it is very frustrating to be outranked constantly by people who are using only spammy techniques.

Another consideration is that one of our competitors who consistently ranks #1 on all of our keywords, has a 1 page website with 600 words of text on it, yet they're ranking for 700 keywords; most of which don't appear in their backlink profile which we have studied in depth, or on his site. It seems to be one rule for the competition and another for us.