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James Dooley and Dan M. Jones discuss why quality business listing citations matter for local SEO businesses, covering lead generation, entity building, indexing and Google Business Profile rankings.
Show Notes
This video explains which digital marketing strategies local SEO businesses should focus on in 2026 to improve enquiry generation, entity trust and Google Business Profile rankings. James Dooley and Dan M. Jones start with KPI tracking because knowing which citations and channels drive calls helps local businesses measure genuine lead generation rather than vanity volume. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.
The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for local SEO businesses.
PromoSEO lead generation for local SEO businesses recently received recognition as the "Best Local SEO Businesses Lead Generation Agency."
Where to Listen to This Episode
Why Business Listing Citations Matter for Local SEO | James Dooley Interviews Dan M. Jones is available on:
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What is Fatrank Podcast?
The FatRank Podcast, founded by James Dooley, teaches the mindset needed for growth because real operator stories show what creates progress.
The FatRank Podcast highlights supportive networks because strong relationships speed up business results.
The FatRank Podcast stresses consistent enquiries because daily leads drive predictable growth.
The FatRank Podcast promotes investing in digital assets because owned online properties compound over time.
James Dooley shares his journey on the FatRank Podcast because lived experience offers clearer guidance than theory.
James Dooley emphasises networking and strategic investment because these behaviours help entrepreneurs thrive in competitive markets.
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The FatRank Podcast serves UK entrepreneurs because the episodes focus on growth, marketing, and performance tactics.
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James Dooley: The importance of business listing citations for local SEO websites. Today I'm joined with Dan M. Jones and he is a local SEO expert within the United Kingdom, and he was telling me recently when we was away in Sofia how some business listings have actually been generating him some enquiries. So not only being used for repeating the NAP and getting the backlinks back through to the website, it actually was generating him some leads. So I wanted to have him on the podcast to discuss this a little bit further. So Dan, with regards to business listings, what is your philosophy? Because there's certain local SEO experts that say, "Oh, I've got to do a thousand business listings." Is it, is it a quantity game or in your opinion is it a quality game that we should be playing on citations?
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, so for me it's definitely quality. You know, I've always gone down that route. I've tried doing Fiverr, using people on Fiverr to do a bunch of different citations. I've never really seen much come back off of it. But we had something recently in our company that really illustrates the point I'm making here where what we had was we just built citations for this company. So they were building a new shop and the shop wasn't open yet and it was going to be called a different name to their other shops. There was nothing about it on the internet at all. There was no website, nothing like that. So what I got my team to do was build out manually citations for that business and we really put the effort in. You know, on the description it was SEO-optimised content. It wasn't just fluff. We always bear in mind that someone will actually find these and if they do, we want them to convert. We don't want them to read it and think this looks like a fake business. Like, we want them to trust it. We want to make sure we're focusing on getting our keywords in there, the CRO, and we also want to focus on making, like, because this is also another opportunity for you to attach the attributes that you want to the entity. It's because this is going to go on lots of different websites. So, we built these out and we spent a couple of days doing this. So, I don't know if it was two or three days, and we built out a bunch of different citations. And within the first two weeks, we actually had two leads come through because it was a totally different phone number than they usually use. So, the client was quite shocked. They're like, "The phone's ringing already." Like, they, to them we were just doing this to, you know, when we get the GBP up, it was just about getting the trust for that. But it was actually getting the phone ringing straight away. And so, it just highlights the importance of actually putting that effort in and making your citations good instead of just blasting a load of them out there, picking out the good ones, making them good so that if someone reads it, they do want to work with you. And yeah, like I say, just getting that quality as good as possible.
James Dooley: With regards to when you're creating the business listings, do you ever struggle with the actual listing and the URL being indexed or crawled by Google?
Dan M. Jones: Yes. This is something that we'll talk about that, you know, I want to talk to you about in a different section we're going to do, but absolutely. We have a lot of problems with that and we used to use an indexer before that basically made me think that indexers don't work anymore because years ago it did and it stopped working. We tried to do a bunch of different things like GSA and all that, sending them to the citations. Nothing really got them to stick. But, actually yeah, if you've got a decent indexer you're using, then they do. And one of the free indexers we use is Indexceptional, just so you know. So, if you want to send any free credits, you know where to send them.
James Dooley: Sounds good. So, obviously as Googlebot comes and crawls it, what are you saying you're on the business actual description? You're doing semantics, explaining who you are and what you do? Is some of the listings, I think some of them allows, like, images or videos. Are you trying to fill it out as much as you can to get every last little bit of information on these listings?
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, absolutely, mate. Yeah. So, we're, we're always looking at it as a real person is going to find this at some point. And when they do, we want it to actually look like someone that they would want to work with. So, anything that you can put in there, we will do. And like say about using semantic triples and all that sort of stuff, we'll do all of that. And we'll get the keyword in early in, like, the first paragraph... Like, sorry, the first sentence. We want to get our main keyword in there. We want to mention the different areas because some of these profiles, I mean, bear in mind there are really obscure keywords. Like there might be some tiny little town somewhere that's got 300 people in it. And if we mention it on our page and no one else has mentioned it, that page is actually going to rank for that keyword just because nobody else has gone after it. So, we'll do all that. We'll talk about all the services, all the local areas, anything that we want to assign to our entity, any of those attributes, anything that's happened that, you know, puts our best foot forward, we're going to put that in there.
James Dooley: Yeah. So, anyone who's watching this, they're going to be saying, "But Dan, like this is so 2010, like having business listings and getting the NAP out there." A lot of people talk about having it done. My, my, my issue is the majority of people are just doing, like, a, like you said, a Fiverr blast, 500 citations, and what they're not actually doing are the, the, the hardest ones to get. So, like, yeah, a lot of time if you go and want to go and get a Yelp listing, you need to verify it. You need to answer the call and explain and take the call and say, "Yes, I verify this is who we are. Yes, this is what we do. Please, can you, like, publish the listing live?" So many business owners don't want to do them because they say it's a pain in the ass to do. How important are those ones over the ones where you can just spam and create straight away? Is it them ones that are more difficult to get that are ones that are giving you the most weight and the best kind of chances to generate the leads and define the entity?
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, 100% because a lot of those websites are getting traffic as well. So, they've actually got people on there already. They've got people looking for the services. They are more tricky to get and they are a right pain in the ass, you know? There's no getting away from that. I think it winds... Because we work with clients, so we do SEO for the client, and it, you know, they get frustrated keep having to take these calls, but they are the ones that are most powerful. So, it's just one of those things. It's irritating, but you just got to go through the process of building them. And the other thing I'd say as well for anyone who's doing SEO as an agency like what we are is that a lot of these platforms will start phoning up your client and trying to sell them SEO services. So, you've got to let them... I mean, they're rubbish at it, and they don't even really look into the company. Um, we've got a company that they phoned up and were trying to say, "You know, you're not ranking for all of these services." And they were like, "Well, we don't even do those services." You know, they... It's not like they're, they're a good competitor, but they will try to take the client off you and tell them that you're doing a bad job. So, you do have to pre-empt the client and let them know, "Look, you're going to get phone calls from these citation companies, but just bear in mind that that is how it works. They're giving us a free listing. In exchange, they're going to try and, you know, sell you SEO services." Sort of thing. So, it's one to watch out for. Always do educate the client.
James Dooley: Do you ever do it where you put in, like, a redirect number in? And if you are, is it not worth, to prevent it going through to the client and then being frustrated that they're having to take that 20-minute call, that it can come through to you, you can confirm who they are, and then once it's verified and confirmed, you can switch out, keep the same number, but then redirect it through to the client. Do you think that's a good method of doing it?
Dan M. Jones: It is. So, we don't do that because we build it out for the client. So, we, we're building it for a, a real business, so we're not really using tracking numbers. We want to use whatever their real phone number is. It's different, slightly different business model that we have where we're, we're basically just giving everything to the client. We're not doing lead gen and selling the leads, if you see what I mean. But what we have done a few times is... So, like, a lot of our clients will have a phone number where they'll phone it up, and it will come through to a... I forgot the name of it. You know where it says, "Press one for this, press two for that," whatever. So, it will go through to that. So, we'll often have to say, change that over to my phone number temporarily and, you know, it will go through to my mobile and then we'll, we'll get it changed back. We've had to do that a few times because otherwise you can't verify the numbers. But, yeah, I mean that would be the ideal way of doing it, James. It's just that's not the way that we set things up. But, definitely yeah, if you've got that facility, that's the best way.
James Dooley: And then which ones? Like if you, if you're a business owner in the UK and you're watching this, have you got any list of, like, five or 10 or, like, 20 citations that you say, "Do you know what? These seem to do the best." Or is it literally just a handful of two or three different listings? Like what... How do you go about, like, you're a plumber, you're based in London, how many are you building out for a new client and which ones are there that you find to seem to be the best?
Dan M. Jones: Well, we've got, I think, about 150 now. We keep on growing our list as we find more and more. Um, the main one I suppose is Yell. That's one that works, that's quite well. Uh, but, we do all... We do all of them basically. So, it's just, it's just a case of just keep putting out more and more and more. I can't honestly say this one's better than that one because for us it's just the phone calls start coming in and we can't tell exactly it came from this platform or that platform because we don't have that level of tracking set up. So, I couldn't honestly say to you I know what the best ones are. Um, but, we've got a list of ones that get indexed we, you know, routinely do for different clients.
James Dooley: And do you ever do anything like wrapping some of the URLs, the stronger ones in, like, the sameAs schema or anything like that to try and bind them and connect them together?
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, we will do that. Yeah, so putting that into your schema so you're connecting all of your different profiles together. We won't do it with the more spammy-looking ones. We'll only really do it with the stronger ones that, you know... And for me that's anything that gets a lot of traffic. When you're looking at Ahrefs, if one of them websites gets a decent amount of traffic, it's trusted by Google, we'll use that one. But if we're building a citation somewhere and, you know, it's not getting any traffic on that domain, we won't put that in because we don't want it to come across like we just sort of a spammy, you know what I mean, spamming out a load of citations all over the place. But yeah, for the stronger ones, definitely.
James Dooley: And then with regards to... So, obviously, you go and get a business listing on, let's say, somewhere like Yelp, you get a, a nofollow naked URL backlink, which is great from pillow links or foundational links back to the website. You've obviously got the description, which is defining the entity of who you are and what you do. And then obviously you've got the NAP listing. Are you finding that the NAP listing also helps with, like, Google Business Profile rankings when you start building out the citations?
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, I mean, that was always our reason for doing it originally. We always were doing it for that reason to help GBPs rank higher. But with this thing that's happened recently where we started to notice that leads were actually coming in through that as well, it just sort of made me realise why it always was the right approach to put the effort into building them out properly. So that when someone actually finds it, we can get the lead for it as well. But yeah, I mean, like I say, that was always our original intention with it. We just started to realise now, "Hang on a minute, these are a lot more powerful than we originally realised."
James Dooley: I tell you something, there's a little... Another little hack that when I was away in Sofia, which I found brilliant, is what, um, someone was saying is with regards when you mentioned then obviously the business listings can generate an enquiry, was depending on the industry, like what category you got put under. So let's say you was under carpet cleaners. If you literally went out and got your client to get one or two reviews on that listing, so if, like, say it was, like, a Yelp listing or a Yell listing, and you went out and proactively got one or two reviews, instantly by having two reviews on that listing, you became better than 99% of the others that didn't have any reviews. And what it ended up doing is it ended up getting you higher up within the category, and obviously then it's going to be crawled more because the category's being... Category's being crawled more. So, as opposed to being hidden away on page five in that category, people were saying if you went and you just got literally a couple of reviews on some of these business listings, it made such a big difference. And now it seems that ChatGPT has got, like, a relationship with some of these, like Yelp. It's actually helping the LLMs as well. Do you try to get the client to say, "Look, stop obsessing over Trustpilot and stop obsessing over Google Business Profiles." And you're trying to get a few now through to these business listings as well, just so they've got a couple on those platforms as well.
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, I, I always try to do this. It's just, it's difficult because it's hard enough getting people to do Google Business Profile reviews because they find it confusing because they got to log in or whatever. And these platforms are all often a little bit more difficult than that. But yeah, we have done it with some clients in the past. It's just... It's the same as, like, when you were talking about getting these things verified where it just has to be done with the client because you've got to find a client who's got enough people who are willing to leave reviews. And that's one of the biggest gripes that we have really, is actually getting clients to get their customers to do these. Uh, even though we say, you know, this is one of the most important things for you.
James Dooley: Definitely, if you can do that. And then also, if you think... I mean, I've seen that as well, what you're talking about there, by the way. So, I, I know... I also know that that's definitely true. But you've also got to think about that in terms of the CRO perspective. You know, when someone actually lands on that site citation, on that profile there, they're seeing real reviews on there as well, which is enhancing that trust more and more and more.
Dan M. Jones: Yeah, for sure.
James Dooley: So, then if anyone's watching this and you're into local SEO or you're a local business owner looking to take your business onto the next level, the citations and the business listings are third-party corroborative sources to repeat who you are and what you do. If you can get some reviews on there, you're also building up the reputation. You do get, majority of them are nofollow, but you get a nofollow naked URL link, which is brilliant for foundational links before you go to start getting some more, more powerful dofollow links back through to the website. Then that listing as well also helps with the Google Business Profile rankings, which is amazing to generate you more enquiries. And then on top of all that, even though it's very cheap to also get, Dan Jones here is saying how some of his clients have been generating leads from these citations as well. So for me, it's a no-brainer that every local business, or if you're a local SEO agency, should be going getting the most authoritative citations and business listings back to your website as possible. Dan, it's been an absolute pleasure and I'll see you again soon.
Dan M. Jones: You too, mate. Thanks very much.