Local SEO citations are any online reference to your business's NAP information—name, address, and phone number. They appear on business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and industry-specific platforms, as well as on local chamber sites, news mentions, and review platforms. Search engines use these citations to confirm your business is legitimate and to understand its physical location and service area. Citations come in two types. Structured citations appear on dedicated business listing sites with consistent formatting—Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yelp Canada, and hundreds of niche directories. Unstructured citations are mentions in blog posts, news articles, or event listings where your NAP appears naturally without a formal directory structure. The key ranking factors are consistency and volume. If your business is listed as "Ottawa SEO Inc." on Google but "Ottawa SEO Incorporated" on Yellow Pages, or your address shows Suite 200 in one place and Unit 200 elsewhere, search engines lose confidence. We've seen businesses drop 3-5 positions in the local pack just from inconsistent suite number formatting across 20+ citations. For a local business in Ottawa or any Canadian city, start with 30-50 core citations—the major directories, Canadian-specific platforms like Canada411 and 411.ca, plus your industry verticals. A law firm needs Lawyer.ca and FindLaw. A restaurant needs Zomato and OpenTable. After the foundation, you can scale to 100-150 citations for competitive markets like Toronto real estate or Vancouver legal services. We prioritize quality over quantity. Ten citations on authoritative, relevant sites outperform fifty on abandoned directories that haven't been crawled in years. Watch for duplicate listings—Google sometimes creates multiple profiles for the same location, which splits your citation equity. Always claim and verify your listings rather than letting aggregators auto-generate them with scraped data that's often wrong. Fix errors immediately because citation cleanup is harder than building them correctly from the start.