How can I find duplicate citations for a local business?

Citation Tracker can be used to discover duplicate listings for local businesses by following these steps:

1. First, head to the Citation Tracker tool by clicking 'Citation Tracker' in the Location sidebar menu. If this is your first time using Citation Tracker, check out these handy guides.

2. In your Citation Tracker report, click the 'Actions' dropdown and then select 'Edit Report', which will take you to the Citation Tracker report settings.

3. In the 'Your Business Details' section of the report settings, you'll find a field called 'Look for citations with an old business name, address or phone number?' (shown below within the red box).

This is where you can provide details of alternative business names, addresses, and phone numbers that are different from the main details provided just above this field.

We will use this alternative information to identify citations on the sites we scan. If more than one listing is found on a site, and we can validate that this citation is a match to the business, then we will display it within the report as a duplicate.

How to view duplicates in the Citation Tracker Report

Once the Citation Tracker report has run, you will see the 'Key Citations' tab and the 'Live Citations' tab — both of which display your live citations. The 'Key Citations' tab includes an audit of the name, address, and phone number displayed on the most important citation sites.

In the table of each tab is a column marked 'Status'.

A 'Duplicate' icon within this column (indicated below within the red box), shows that this directory has more than one listing or page containing business information that matches the business on the Citation Tracker report.

How to view and manage duplicate listings

Clicking on the 'Duplicate' icon opens a popup that displays more information about the citations we have found.

We display the NAP data at the top of this popup for the listing that we believe is the closest business match — this is called the 'Primary Citation'.

In the 'Possible Duplicates' section, we display information about any duplicate listings we found, including:

• The listing URL
• The name, address, and phone number (if we are able to extract this from the page on this site)

If one of the duplicate listings should be the Primary listing, you can set it by clicking the 'Make Primary' button, which will swap it with the Primary citation.

Should you find a duplicate that isn't genuine, you can remove it from the report by clicking 'Dismiss Duplicate'.

You can also use this popup to:

• Make notes about each citation site
• Rate each citation site (many customers will find this helpful if they manage their citations themselves)

How to remove duplicate listings

Duplicate listings can negatively affect your local ranking, so it's strongly recommended that you get them removed from the citation site.

As Citation Tracker only reports on citations (rather than allowing you to control them), there are two options for getting rid of duplicate citations:

1. Fix them yourself on the directories

Click the 'View' button to visit each web page containing your citations directly from your report. Some directories will allow you to claim and edit the listings, however, others will require you to contact the site editors to provide evidence of duplicate listings. The more information you provide, the easier it is for the editors to make a decision to remove the duplicates.

2. Create a Citation Builder campaign — we’ll take of the duplicates

Easily manage citations and remove duplicates by using our Citation Builder service. Just click the 'Create Citation Builder Campaign' button at the top of your report (indicated below within the red box), select how many sites you want us to work on, and select the 'Find and Remove Duplicate Listings' option.

Duplicate removal costs an additional 20% of your campaign cost. So, for example, if you select a 25-citation campaign, this equates to:

25 x $3 = $75
+ 10% = $82.50

There are some sites displayed in the Citation Tracker report that we are, unfortunately, unable to submit to, update or remove duplicates from — this is due to some sites' restrictions, or because they charge a fee to complete these actions. Look out for the icon showing purple pins to see which citation sites are compatible with Citation Builder.

Click here to find out more about our Citation Builder service.