Citations: buy them, but check every one before you pay

What you're doing and why

Links are the gap between page 3 and page 1, and the cheapest first batch is citations — your business name, address and phone listed in online directories. You can buy a few hundred for very little on a freelance marketplace. The catch: nobody checks whether they were actually delivered, and vendors know it. This lesson is how we bought them, and how we verified every single one before paying a cent.

The exact steps

1. Buy a citation package for each site — a few hundred listings is a normal cheap gig. Give the vendor your exact business name, address and the tracked phone number from your site (not your personal mobile). Consistency of that phone number is the whole point.
2. Get the delivery sheet. You should receive a spreadsheet with one row per listing: the source directory and the live URL.
3. Verify before paying. Hand the sheet to Claude Code:

   "Open every URL in this spreadsheet, tell me how many are live, how many actually show the business name, and list the dead ones for the vendor."

4. Spot-check the phone number. A citation with the wrong number is worthless — that consistency is the ranking signal. Ask for the phone to be confirmed on the listings that load.
5. Send the vendor the dead list and ask for replacements before you release payment. This is a completely normal ask for this kind of gig.
6. Then add a handful of real local links yourself — chamber of commerce, a sponsored local event or team, a local news mention. Ten of these outweigh another hundred directories.

What it looked like for us

We had five sites done at about 200 listings each and checked all ~1,000 URLs twice (the second pass with longer timeouts, because slow directories look dead on the first try):

• The phone numbers were right. We spot-checked the tracked number on the quality listings for all five sites: 5 out of 5 correct. Wrong-number citations are worthless, so this was the single most important check.
• The mix was honest-but-mid. 336 different directories were used. Roughly 35–40% were real mid-tier citation sites (Hotfrog, Manta, Brownbook, EZlocal and similar). Around a quarter were filler — profile pages on Issuu, Gravatar, SpeakerDeck, even TED — which are link pages, not real NAP citations. None of the top-tier majors were included: no Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, Foursquare or BBB.
• Verdict: fair value for cheap-blast pricing, once the dead ones are replaced. Each site nets roughly 60–90 genuine, live, correct-NAP citations, which clears the bar the research actually supports.

Gotchas

• "Unreachable" doesn't always mean "not delivered." Plenty of directories block automated checkers with a 403 or sit in moderation. Open five of the flagged ones yourself before accusing the vendor — if they load fine in your browser, the delivery is better than the report suggests.
• Quantity is not the metric. The expert consensus is blunt: ten citations from authoritative sources beat fifty from low-quality directories. For a small market, 10–20 good ones is enough.
• The majors are the real upgrade, and they're manual. Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yelp and Yellow Pages need phone or email verification, which is exactly why the cheap gig skips them. Do those yourself — you own the tracked number and the email, so it's an afternoon, not a purchase.
• Those spreadsheets contain logins. Ours arrived with usernames and passwords for each listing in plain columns. Keep the file private and don't paste it anywhere public.
• Do the sites that are actually ranking first. We had citations on five sites that were sitting idle, and zero on the two that were already climbing at #22 and #35. Spend where the movement is.