You can use Whitespark local citation finder to analyze your competitors local and niche citations. That is mentions of their businesses. Some of the citations will link out to your competitors and some won’t. Building a list of good citations is important. The best method in which to do this is using Whitespark to analyze your top ranking competitors. Then you start submitting your business to the best local directories and platforms that are revealed in the Whitespark report. This list is gold.
Afteyou get this list together and have submitted to the best 60 that your competitors are taking advantage of. Find other decent citations they have missed. You can search Google for lists of citations for free. Everything I mentioned above can be done cheaply or for free.
It takes a little while to learn how to use Whitespark and it is very time consuming to do all of your submissions yourself. 10 to 15 minutes per submission for someone who know what they are doing.
You also need to be very careful. You do not want to mess up your submissions by choosing weak directories or worse by not keeping your information consistent. Google judges this information and it is an important factor for ranking locally.
Either take time to learn how to do this or hire someone that can. Hint hint… 🙂