Structured citation
Also called: structured citations, business directory citation
A structured citation is a listing of your business's name, address, and phone number (NAP) on a formatted online directory such as Google Business Profile, Yelp, or Bing Places, where dedicated fields for each detail make the data easy for search engines to read and trust.
The defining trait is the format, not the website. If a page gives you a form with separate boxes for Name, Address, and Phone, the result is a structured citation. If your details are woven into a paragraph (a blog post, a news article, a sponsor page), that is an unstructured citation. Both count, but structured listings are the ones engines parse most reliably because the data sits in labeled fields.
Where they live and why NAP matters
Common structured citation sources include Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, and directories specific to your industry. Many propagate through data aggregators, so one clean submission can seed dozens of downstream sites.
The whole point is NAP consistency. Every listing should render the same string, for example:
Acme Plumbing
128 Market St, Suite 4, Austin, TX 78701
(512) 555-0142Mismatched spellings, an old address, or a swapped phone number split the signal and make engines less confident the business is real and located where it claims. Google’s own guidance ties local ranking to relevance, distance, and prominence, with prominence reflecting how well-known a business is based on signals it collects from across the web, like links and reviews. Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey has ranked citation signals among the more influential Local Pack factors, though their weight has eased since 2015.
How it affects your traffic
If your business needs to show up in the Google local pack and on Maps, structured citations are the baseline you build on. Inconsistent or missing NAP data across directories is one of the most common reasons a local business ranks below competitors it should beat. Our Local SEO service audits every listing, corrects conflicting NAP details, and builds citations on the directories that matter for your industry and region, so engines and customers get one consistent answer about where you are and how to reach you.
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