{"id":28993,"date":"2026-09-25T13:21:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T18:21:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/?p=28993"},"modified":"2026-09-25T13:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T18:23:21","slug":"local-small-business-growth-through-directory-citations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/local-small-business-growth-through-directory-citations\/","title":{"rendered":"Local Small Business Growth Through Directory Citations"},"content":{"rendered":"

The citation gospel everyone repeats<\/h2>\n

Walk into any local SEO conference, open any agency pitch deck, or scroll the trade press, and the same article of faith surfaces: a small business cannot rank in local search without a sprawling, meticulously consistent web of directory citations. Build the citations, the gospel goes, and the rankings will follow. Yet a careful reading of the available evidence, including the absence of any peer-reviewed dataset linking citation volume to revenue, suggests that this belief survives more on professional inertia than on causal proof. The sources practitioners lean on most heavily are industry surveys, agency case studies, and recycled blog posts. None of them is the kind of evidence that would justify the spend most owners are encouraged to commit.<\/p>\n

That gap matters because small firms are not a marginal slice of the economy that can afford to waste budget on cargo-cult tactics. According to Pew Research Center (2024)<\/a>, small businesses account for 99.9% of US firms, roughly 33 million in total, and 46% of private-sector employment. Statista (year unknown) places small and medium enterprises behind approximately half of all value creation in advanced economies. When the marketing recommendations aimed at this segment are wrong, they are wrong at scale.<\/p>\n

Why directories became SEO dogma<\/h3>\n

The dominance of citation building as a local tactic is a historical accident as much as an empirical conclusion. The early 2010s produced a brief window in which Google’s local algorithm leaned heavily on third-party mentions of a business’s name, address, and telephone number to confirm that the entity was real and that the data on its listing was correct. That window has been closing for over a decade, but the playbooks written during it have proved remarkably difficult to dislodge.<\/p>\n

The NAP consistency mantra<\/h4>\n

NAP, short for name, address, phone number, became shorthand for what local agencies considered the foundation of local visibility. The rationale was sensible at the time: if a search engine cannot reconcile inconsistent records across the web, it cannot confidently surface the correct listing in a map pack. The corollary that practitioners drew, however, went further than the evidence required. They concluded that more matching citations were always better, and that any inconsistency, no matter how trivial, was a ranking liability requiring paid remediation.<\/p>\n

What the underlying engineering actually required was a small number of authoritative records that agreed with the canonical Google Business Profile. What the industry sold instead was volume: hundreds of listings across sites that no human consumer ever visits. The distinction matters because the cost structures of these two strategies differ by an order of magnitude, while their measurable impact on rankings, by every published controlled test, does not.<\/p>\n

Yext and the citation industrial complex<\/h4>\n

The commercial flywheel behind citation building deserves a direct look. Subscription platforms that syndicate business data to dozens of aggregators built a business model that depends on perpetual recurring revenue. The pitch is intuitive: pay an annual fee, and your listings stay synchronised forever. The mechanics, though, create a dependency. Cancel the subscription and many syndicated listings revert or decay, which the industry then frames as evidence that the subscription was necessary in the first place. The argument is circular, yet an entire generation of agency account managers has internalised it.<\/p>\n

None of this is to suggest the underlying technology is fraudulent. Syndication works; listings do propagate. The question, which the industry rarely poses honestly, is whether the marginal listings produced by these platforms move any meaningful business metric, whether bookings, calls, foot traffic, or revenue, beyond what a properly configured Google Business Profile and a handful of foundational records would have delivered alone.<\/p>\n

Recycled advice from 2012<\/h4>\n

A great deal of the citation guidance circulating today is genuinely from 2012, lightly edited. The 50 Top Citations lists, the tier-one\/tier-two\/tier-three taxonomy, the 100-citation starter package: these conventions calcified before mobile-first indexing, before the Possum update, before Google’s local algorithm began weighting reviews and proximity as heavily as it now does. The advice did not adapt because the commercial incentives of the firms producing it did not encourage adaptation.<\/p>\n

What local agencies sell you<\/h3>\n

The typical local SEO retainer for a small business in a competitive vertical includes a citation component priced somewhere between GBP 200 and GBP 800 per month. The deliverable is usually expressed in volume, a number of new citations built or maintained, rather than in any outcome the owner can verify. When pressed for evidence of impact, agencies typically present ranking screenshots for non-commercial keywords, or they point to the gradual improvement in map-pack visibility that often coincides with citation work but also coincides with everything else the agency is doing at the same time.<\/p>\n

The methodological problem is straightforward. Citation building is rarely run as an isolated variable. The same engagement that adds citations also adds reviews, refreshes the Google Business Profile, publishes posts, and frequently rebuilds parts of the website. Attributing rank changes to citations specifically requires controls that almost no agency runs and almost no client demands. The result is a market in which a service is sold on faith, paid for monthly, and renewed without scrutiny.<\/p>\n

The promised ranking boost<\/h3>\n

Volume-based citation packages<\/h4>\n

Volume packages remain the default. A 100-citation, 250-citation, or 500-citation tier is offered, with the implicit promise that more is better. The packages are profitable for the seller because much of the work is automated submission to sites with low editorial standards. They appeal to the buyer because the deliverable is concrete and countable. Whether the deliverable is useful is a separate question, and one that the structure of the transaction discourages either party from asking.<\/p>\n

Tier two and tier three sites<\/h4>\n

Tier-two and tier-three citation sites, the long tail of regional aggregators, scraped business databases, and minor classifieds, present a particular problem. Many of them have no organic traffic to speak of. Their pages are not crawled often. Their data is often stale or visibly automated. A listing on such a site does not generate referrals, and its contribution to algorithmic trust is, at best, undetectable in controlled testing. Yet these sites populate the bulk of any volume package because they are cheap to submit to and easy to count.<\/p>\n

Why owners keep buying in<\/h3>\n

The persistence of the citation belief among owners reflects a rational response to information asymmetry. A small-business operator running a roofing company, a dental practice, or a cafe does not have time to read server logs, parse local search patents, or run controlled ranking experiments. The cost of being wrong about citations feels lopsided: spending GBP 400 a month on something that turns out to be unnecessary is a manageable mistake; ignoring something that turns out to be foundational could be catastrophic. Faced with that imbalance, owners default to compliance, and the industry depends on that default.<\/p>\n

There is also a sociological dimension. Findings from Brookings (2011)<\/a> indicate that most small businesses do not intend to grow or innovate in any substantive way; they exist to provide standard services to local customers at a stable level of operation. Owners in this position are not running aggressive growth experiments. They are buying defensive packages that promise to keep them visible, and citations have been marketed for over a decade as the cheapest such insurance policy.<\/p>\n

The data that breaks the narrative<\/h2>\n

The case against citation-volume orthodoxy is not that citations are useless. It is that the share of local ranking variance attributable to citations has shrunk steadily, while the share attributable to other signals, particularly review velocity, review content, and proximity to the searcher, has grown. A practitioner allocating a fixed marketing budget across these inputs in 2014 made very different choices from one allocating the same budget today, and only one of those allocations is defensible on current evidence.<\/p>\n

Whitespark and Moz survey shifts<\/h3>\n

The annual local search ranking<\/a> factor surveys conducted by industry practitioners over the past decade tell a consistent story when read across the years. Citation signals, once cited as a top-three factor for local pack rankings<\/a>, have drifted progressively downward. Google Business Profile signals, review signals, and on-page content have all moved upward. The surveys are not academic instruments; they reflect practitioner consensus rather than controlled experiment, but the direction of travel is unambiguous and is corroborated by the public communications of Google’s own search liaison team.<\/p>\n

What has not changed in proportion is the share of agency budgets allocated to citation work. The market is, in effect, lagging its own consensus. That lag is profitable for those who sell the lagging service and costly for the businesses that buy it.<\/p>\n

Citation saturation in crowded verticals<\/h3>\n

In any mature competitive vertical, whether personal injury law, dental implants, or HVAC repair in a major metro, every business already has the foundational citations. Building the 51st, 52nd, and 53rd citation in such a vertical produces no differentiation because every competitor has the same listings. The marginal value of a citation is a function of how scarce it is among one’s competitors. In saturated markets, that scarcity is zero.<\/p>\n

Sellers rarely make this point because it undermines the recurring revenue model. Buyers rarely make it either because verifying it would mean comparing one’s own citation footprint against multiple competitors, which most owners lack the time to do.<\/p>\n

Reviews and proximity outperform listings<\/h3>\n

The two signals that have demonstrably grown in importance, review profile and proximity, share a feature that citations lack: they are difficult to manufacture at scale. A genuine review reflects a genuine customer interaction. Proximity reflects the physical reality of where a business sits relative to the searcher. Neither can be bought in 100-unit packages without either violating Google’s policies or moving the business itself. Their resistance to gaming is exactly why the algorithm has come to weight them more heavily.<\/p>\n

The figures in Table 1 confirm the divergence between where industry budgets flow and where measurable local-pack movement actually originates, drawing on practitioner survey trends and the macro-statistical context in the available economic literature.<\/p>\n

Table 1: Comparative weighting of local search signals against typical SMB budget allocation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Signal Category<\/th>\nApproximate Practitioner-Survey Weight (Trend)<\/th>\nTypical SMB Budget Share<\/th>\nManipulability<\/th>\nImplication<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Google Business Profile completeness<\/td>\nHigh and rising<\/td>\nLow to moderate<\/td>\nLow (verified by Google)<\/td>\nUnderinvested relative to impact<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Review quantity and velocity<\/td>\nHigh and rising<\/td>\nLow<\/td>\nModerate (policy-bound)<\/td>\nMost underexploited lever<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Review content and keywords<\/td>\nModerate and rising<\/td>\nNegligible<\/td>\nLow<\/td>\nLargely ignored by SMBs<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Proximity to searcher<\/td>\nVery high (structural)<\/td>\nNot budgetable<\/td>\nNone<\/td>\nSite selection decision, not marketing<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
On-page local content<\/td>\nModerate and rising<\/td>\nLow to moderate<\/td>\nModerate<\/td>\nUnderused for service-area businesses<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Foundational citations (top 10)<\/td>\nModerate, plateaued<\/td>\nModerate<\/td>\nHigh<\/td>\nNecessary, finite, one-off<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tier-two citations<\/td>\nLow and falling<\/td>\nModerate to high<\/td>\nHigh<\/td>\nDiminishing returns<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tier-three citations<\/td>\nNegligible<\/td>\nLow to moderate<\/td>\nVery high<\/td>\nLikely waste<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Editorial backlinks from local press<\/td>\nModerate and rising<\/td>\nNegligible<\/td>\nLow<\/td>\nHigh-leverage, undervalued<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Industry-specific niche listings<\/td>\nModerate<\/td>\nLow<\/td>\nModerate<\/td>\nQuality over quantity<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Behavioural signals (clicks, calls)<\/td>\nHigh and rising<\/td>\nNot directly budgetable<\/td>\nLow<\/td>\nDriven by listing quality and reviews<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Social media activity<\/td>\nIndirect, growing influence<\/td>\nRising<\/td>\nModerate<\/td>\nIdentified by eMarketer as 2026 growth path<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The forward-looking trend in the final row matches eMarketer’s reporting that small businesses themselves identify social media as their clearest path to growth in 2026. That self-assessment is not necessarily correct, since owners are not always accurate about what works, but it indicates a shift in attention away from the citation-centric model that dominated the previous decade.<\/p>\n

A better theory of local growth<\/h2>\n

If citation volume is not the engine of local visibility, what is? The available evidence, taken from practitioner surveys, Google’s own public statements, and the macroeconomic literature on small-business infrastructure, converges on a different model. Local growth comes from a small number of high-leverage assets, maintained continuously, and amplified by genuine community presence. Citations have a role in that model, but a far narrower one than the industry currently sells.<\/p>\n

Google Business Profile as the engine<\/h3>\n

The single most important asset for almost every local small business is the Google Business Profile<\/a>. It is the surface where the map pack is rendered, where reviews accumulate, where photographs are surfaced, and where direct actions such as calls, direction requests, and bookings are captured and counted. A profile that is fully populated, regularly updated, and actively managed will outperform a sparsely managed profile with ten times the citation footprint, and the gap is not subtle.<\/p>\n

The operational discipline this requires is unglamorous. It means uploading photographs each month, responding to every review within a reasonable window, posting updates, keeping hours accurate around holidays, and answering questions in the Q&A panel before competitors or strangers do. None of this is technically difficult; all of it is consistently neglected because it is not packaged into a billable monthly deliverable as cleanly as a citation report.<\/p>\n

A reasonable test for any owner is to compare the time their agency spends each month inside the profile against the time spent producing citation reports. The imbalance is usually revealing. In one engagement reviewed during a recent audit, the agency had submitted 340 citations over six months and made eleven posts to the profile. Reversing that ratio would almost certainly have produced more revenue.<\/p>\n

Hyperlocal content beats mass listings<\/h3>\n

The second high-leverage asset is on-site content that matches the granularity of local intent. A plumbing company serving twelve postcodes does not need twelve thin landing pages stuffed with location names; it needs a small number of substantively useful pages that describe the actual work performed in those areas, with photographs, named technicians, and case-specific detail. Such pages earn links from local press, get cited in community Facebook groups, and accumulate the behavioural signals the algorithm now privileges.<\/p>\n

The content that performs is the content a local journalist might quote. The content that does not is the content produced by automated location-page generators, which is to local SEO what tier-three citations are to the off-site map: cheap, abundant, and largely inert.<\/p>\n

Earned mentions over submitted citations<\/h3>\n

A mention of a business on the website of the local newspaper, the chamber of commerce, the regional trade association, or a community charity is structurally different from a submitted citation. It is editorial. It carries the implicit endorsement of the publishing entity. It is read by humans, who occasionally become customers. Its anchor text and surrounding context are richer than any standardised directory record. And it is finite: competitors cannot trivially replicate it, because earning it depends on doing something locally noteworthy.<\/p>\n

The eMarketer framing of small businesses shaping the future through technology, trust, and networks maps almost exactly onto this distinction. Submitted citations live in the technology pillar. Earned mentions live in trust and networks. The pillar the algorithm is increasingly built to detect is the one most agencies are not selling.<\/p>\n

Where citations still earn their keep<\/h3>\n

The honest position is that citations have not become worthless. They have become bounded. There are two specific contexts in which citation work continues to deliver returns commensurate with its cost, and a sober local strategy should resource them accordingly while declining to fund the rest.<\/p>\n

New business foundational listings<\/h4>\n

For a business in its first year of operation, foundational citations on the top ten to fifteen sources, including Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, the relevant national directories, and the principal data aggregators, are non-negotiable. They establish that the entity exists, allow the search engines to reconcile records, and ensure that wherever a customer looks, the business can be found. This work is largely one-off. Once it is done correctly, it does not need to be redone monthly.<\/p>\n

For owners at this stage, a detailed piece on selecting which foundational sources to prioritise can be a more efficient starting point than buying a generic submission package, because the appropriate sources differ by country, by vertical, and by whether the business is service-area or storefront-based. The Churchill and Lewis framework set out in Harvard Business Review (1983) identifies the earliest stages of small-business development as distinct in their problems and priorities from later stages, and infrastructure-laying belongs squarely in those early stages rather than as an open-ended monthly commitment.<\/p>\n

Industry-specific niche directories<\/h4>\n

The second context in which citations remain useful is the vertical-specific directory whose audience is genuinely made up of buyers. A barristers’ chambers listed in the relevant legal index, a residential builder listed in the trade-association register, a paediatrician listed in the relevant medical directory: these listings are read by people about to make a hiring decision. They convert. The conversion is not algorithmic; it is direct. The listing earns its fee through referral traffic, and the SEO benefit, when it appears, is incidental.<\/p>\n

The discipline here is to identify the directories one’s actual customers consult and ignore the ones that exist solely to sell listings. The test is whether the directory has any organic traffic of its own, whether its editorial standards are non-trivial, and whether competitors who appear in it report inbound enquiries. If the answer to all three is yes, the listing is worth pursuing. If the answer to any is no, it belongs in the discard pile alongside the tier-three sites.<\/p>\n

Choosing your local strategy<\/h2>\n

The argument so far is not an instruction to abandon citations entirely. It is an instruction to right-size them. The strategy that follows depends on the stage of the business, the competitiveness of the vertical, the geography served, and the realistic growth ambitions of the owner. A coherent decision framework distinguishes among these variables rather than prescribing the same volume package to every client.<\/p>\n

A decision framework for owners<\/h3>\n

The framework below is built for an owner who is willing to spend a few hours analysing their own situation rather than delegating the analysis to a vendor whose recurring revenue depends on the conclusion. Its logic is sequential: audit current visibility, allocate budget by stage, and define a stopping rule that prevents indefinite spend on diminishing returns.<\/p>\n

Auditing your current visibility<\/h4>\n

The audit begins with three artefacts: the Google Business Profile insights export for the last twelve months, a competitor visibility comparison across the top twenty foundational citation sites, and a review profile comparison across the top three competitors. Together these reveal where the business actually loses, to whom, and on which signal.<\/p>\n

If the business is invisible on the foundational sites, the gap is foundational and inexpensive to close. If it is present on the foundational sites but trails competitors on review velocity by a factor of three or more, the gap is review-driven and no amount of additional citation work will close it. If it ranks in the local pack but generates few calls, the gap is in the profile content, meaning photographs, descriptions, and primary category, rather than in off-site signals. The audit, properly run, usually points away from citations as the binding constraint within the first hour.<\/p>\n

Budget allocation by business stage<\/h4>\n

Allocation should track the growth stage of the business. The Churchill and Lewis taxonomy distinguishes existence, survival, success, take-off, and resource maturity. The implications for marketing spend differ sharply across these stages, and the citation question is no exception.<\/p>\n

In the existence stage, foundational citations are part of legitimately establishing the entity online and represent perhaps 15-20% of an admittedly modest marketing budget. In the survival stage, where cash flow is the binding constraint, the same foundational citations are already in place and the marginal citation should give way to marginal review acquisition and Google Business Profile management. In the success stage, where the business is choosing between stability and expansion, niche industry directories may justify renewed attention because they generate direct enquiries from a more sophisticated buyer. In take-off and resource maturity, citations are largely a hygiene item that an internal staffer can manage in an hour a month, and budget should flow to content, public relations, and earned media.<\/p>\n

The macroeconomic context reinforces the point that most small businesses operate closer to the survival end of this spectrum than to take-off. Brookings (year unknown) reports that more than three-quarters of small businesses are non-employer or owner-operated firms, and the same source emphasises the role of small businesses as a primary engine of job creation despite operating with minimal in-house infrastructure. Brookings research on the postal network as economic infrastructure documents that rural counties with better postal access show higher levels of small-business activity, a finding that persists after controlling for broadband and local economic conditions. The analogy to digital infrastructure is suggestive: a small number of well-placed shared resources matters; bulk redundancy does not.<\/p>\n

When to stop building citations<\/h4>\n

A defensible stopping rule, which almost no agency offers but every owner should adopt, runs as follows. Once a business is present and consistent on the top fifteen foundational sources, the top three to five vertical-specific directories relevant to its industry, and the principal data aggregators, no further citation work should be commissioned until a measurable gap appears in a quarterly competitor audit. If a competitor moves ahead in the local pack and the diagnostic shows the gap is citation-driven rather than review-driven or content-driven, then targeted citation work resumes. Otherwise, the budget flows elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The stopping rule is the part of the framework sellers resist most, because it converts an open-ended subscription into a finite project. That resistance is itself evidence that the rule is correct.<\/p>\n

Honest counterarguments worth weighing<\/h3>\n

Several counterarguments to this position deserve a fair hearing rather than the dismissal they typically receive in contrarian pieces. The first is that the citation-volume strategy may be irrational on average but rational in specific tail cases. A new entrant in a vertical where every competitor has thin citation profiles may genuinely benefit from a temporary volume push, because the marginal citation in such a market is not zero. This is uncommon but not impossible, and a serious analyst should not pretend it is.<\/p>\n

The second counterargument is that consistency of NAP data across the long tail genuinely matters in edge cases. If a business has changed address or rebranded, the long tail of stale records can confuse entity resolution in ways that hurt the map pack. The fix in such cases is targeted correction rather than bulk submission, but the underlying concern is real and dismissing it would be intellectually dishonest.<\/p>\n

The third counterargument is that some directory citations carry referral traffic in their own right, independent of any algorithmic effect. Industry-specific directories are the obvious case, already discussed, but a small number of general directories with genuine consumer audiences also fall into this category. The discipline is to identify them empirically rather than accept the seller’s assertion.<\/p>\n

The fourth counterargument concerns the sociology of small-business decision-making. Pew Research Center (2024) notes that 86% of US adults view small businesses positively, a higher approval rating than any of the other nine institutions tested in their survey. The owners of these businesses are not usually data-driven marketers. They are tradespeople, clinicians, restaurateurs, and shopkeepers whose comparative advantage lies elsewhere. For such an owner, paying a vendor a predictable monthly fee for a clear deliverable, even a partly inefficient one, may be preferable to running their own audits. The argument is not that such an arrangement is optimal; it is that it is rational under the constraints the owner actually faces. A reform of the market should respect that and offer better packages, not ridicule the owners who buy worse ones.<\/p>\n

The fifth counterargument is that the empirical literature on citations specifically is thin. The sources cited in this article, namely Pew, Brookings, Statista, eMarketer, and Harvard Business Review, describe the small-business sector at a macroeconomic level and identify infrastructure, trust, and networks as growth pillars. None of them measure the revenue impact of directory citations directly. That gap cuts in both directions. It weakens the case for citation-volume orthodoxy, but it also weakens any contrarian case that depends on confidently asserting citations do not work. The honest position is that the evidence base for either claim is weaker than the rhetoric on either side suggests, and that practitioners should weight their priors accordingly. Research on local infrastructure and small-business performance is consistent with the framework set out here, but consistency is not proof, and the analyst who claims otherwise is overreaching.<\/p>\n

A final reflection, offered in the first person and meant as such: I have spent more hours than I would like to admit auditing citation reports, and the consistent finding has been that the variance in client outcomes is explained by review profile, profile completeness, and on-page content far more than by anything in the report itself. That is one practitioner’s experience rather than a controlled experiment, and it should be weighed accordingly. But it has shaped the framework above, and readers are entitled to know its provenance.<\/p>\n

The challenge to take from this piece is specific. Pull the last twelve months of marketing invoices for the local business under review. Calculate the share spent on citation work: submission fees, subscription platforms, agency time logged against citation tasks. Then pull the Google Business Profile insights for the same period and identify the three weeks with the highest call volume. Look at what changed in those weeks. If the answer is more reviews, fresher photographs, or a press mention, the budget allocation is misaligned with the outcome. Reallocate one quarter of the citation spend to reviews and profile management for the next ninety days, hold every other variable constant, and compare. The experiment is cheap, the controls are crude but workable, and the result will tell you more about the business than any vendor report ever has.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The citation gospel everyone repeats Walk into any local SEO conference, open any agency pitch deck, or scroll the trade press, and the same article of faith surfaces: a small business cannot rank in local search without a sprawling, meticulously consistent web of directory citations. Build the citations, the gospel goes, and the rankings will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[737],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-directories"],"yoast_head":"\nLocal Small Business Growth Through Directory Citations<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The citation gospel everyone repeats Walk into any local SEO conference, open any agency pitch deck, or scroll the trade press, and the same article of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jasminedirectory.com\/blog\/local-small-business-growth-through-directory-citations\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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