With standard backlinks in years gone by Quantity (web 2.0 profiles + blog comments etc...) used to seem to be as important as Quality. This has obviously changed allot over the past 3 or 4 years with a much larger emphasis on Quality.
With NAP / Citation building what is the current consensus on Quantity vs Quality ? I was recently looking at some citation building services and they where saying they have over 1000 sites they submit to. Is this relevant or do you just need the core 10 sites (google local, facebook local, Yelp, Foursquare etc..) plus any industry / niche specific sites ?
I think what you do with citations depends on where the business stands as far as NAP changes over time. The more times you change addresses/phone numbers, the more citation work you'll need to do in order to get the information more consistent across the web.
For companies that boast having 1000's of citation sources... most of those will be irrelevant. Don't go for volume for pure sake of volume. Make sure the sites that users actually use to get data are correct, and make sure you're cleaning up duplicates or wrong data.
Consistency & authority of the source is more important that sheer number of citations.
Completely agreed with Eric here.
Claim your data-aggregators and any place where direct customer contact can happen (like Yelp) and 99% of the time everything else will take care of itself eventually.
Continually building citations is a waste of time, mostly because diminishing returns hit fast.
1. Complete and verify your NAP on Acxiom, Localeze, Infogroup.
2. Claim, verify and enhance your Google local isting/s, the one on Bing, and Apple Maps.
3. Go over your business profiles on Facebook, Twitter.
4. Claim and verify your listings on Yelp, YellowPages and on those directories, which require phone verification.
Then perform a quick audit (you can use some of the free online tools out there). If you use a predefined list of relevant directories, make sure to go down the list in descending order in terms of source quality.
There are a lot of lists of directories out there. Most of the 3rd party directories are regularly crawled by search engines.
Local Business directories (especially the ones that are spam free) should be in your radar to get your business listed.
Industry-specific directories are also of great value for your local business, so don’t omit them.
As it comes to your question regarding quality vs quantity: it usually depends on the location and the specific niche that the business specializes in.
If you’re hardly facing any competition and you operate in a small city, then submitting your business to the key ten directories should do the trick and give you the competitive edge you need to rank in the local pack.
In other words, all factors being equal (which is hardly ever the case, but if we image it for a moment), a business with more and also relevant citations is going to appear higher in the search engine results as compared to a business with fewer citations.
For companies (such as WhiteSpark, BrightLocal) that have compiled lists of more than 1000 sources, it is important to keep into account that all of those sources are not meant to be used on a single business but rather are the total number of directories for different niches, locations, etc. Of those 1000 a business could get up to 100-120 relevant citations in total at best.