How to Write a Good Business Description for Local Citations

Here’s a hot tip many businesses don’t think about when building citations for local SEO. In my latest video, I explain why the first sentence of your description is so important, and how to make the most of it.

Video Transcript

Hey, here’s a quick citation building tip that a lot of businesses are missing out on.

Whether or not you’re building citations with our listing service or you’re building them yourself, the description field is very important.

Why business descriptions are important

Let’s say you order citations from us and you’re entering the description. This field is your opportunity to get some additional keywords in. Though I wouldn’t say keywords on your Google Business Profile description have an impact on rankings, keywords in your citation descriptions are actually very important.

For example, if you look at the description of this law firm, Flanagan, Unger and Grover (not a client of ours), they say: “Flanagan, Unger and Grover Attorneys at Law provide legal assistance with criminal charges of all types.”

The painful thing here is that no one is searching Google for “legal assistance with criminal charges”. If someone is looking for a criminal defense attorney in Glendale, CA, they would go to Google and type in” criminal defense attorney Glendale, CA”.

So, get those keywords in your description.

How to improve your business description

If I was going to rewrite this for the brand, I would say something like: “If you’re looking for the best criminal defense attorney in Glendale, CA, look no further than Flanagan, Unger, and Grover Attorneys at Law.” That simple rewrite has a big impact because now you’ve got “criminal defense attorney in Glendale, CA.”

And you have to think about how Google’s algorithm works. You’ve got this business entity at Google, your Google Business Profile, so Google’s always crawling the web, trying to understand and learn as much as it can about the business. This means it looks through your citations.

So, in this case, Flanagan, Unger and Grover are not feeding Google the food that it needs to understand their business. That’s your goal here with the description. Get additional keywords in there, so that you can tell Google what your business is about and what keywords you want to rank for.

Front-load those keywords

It’s also very important to front load those keywords because some sites only give you a small amount of space (i.e. Foursquare). Aim to get those money keywords in the first sentence.

For example, if you look at this business’s website, you can see they clearly care about being a DUI attorney, homicide attorney, and suspended driver’s license attorney.

Those are the keywords that they care about, so they should definitely be in their description. They’re not right now.

Make sure that you think about this next time you’re adding a business listing or when you are ordering citations through a service like ours. This will help you get the most out of your business listings.

See you next time!