Microdata
Google is going to be pushing a lot of focus in 2014 on ‘rich snippets’. “Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query. If Google understands the content on your pages, we can create rich snippets—detailed information intended to help users with specific queries” – via Google.
Do you have rich snippets and schema mark-up for your name? Do you have it for your Business/Organization name and address? Phone number? Are your services/products marked up? These are the things that you need to ask yourself going into 2014. Are you staying ahead of the pack?
Citations
Citations are occurrences of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across the web, and can be found on directories like yp.com (Yellow Pages), your local chamber of commerce, or even an industry-specific directory like findaplumber.com. And they just happen to be an integral part of search engines algorithms.
Like a backlink, a citation sends trust signals to the search engines, and strengthens the validity and authority of your site. For Local SEO, a citation is the equivalent of a backlink, and the more you have, the more certainty Google has in knowing you are who you say you are. But the key is consistency. Your citations NAP needs to be consistent every time it’s mentioned, otherwise you risk the chance that a search engines won’t count them.
It’s important to know that citations, for the most part, come from directories that have their own traffic as well. So if you look at search holistically, the more citations you have from quality directories, the more referral traffic you’re going to get from visitors searching for your product or service.
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