Supplementary citations can either be built or earned on a wide variety of publications, including blogs, news sites, apps, maps, government databases, and more. You can either intentionally develop these citations for your business, or simply earn them based on merit and public interest/sharing of information.

All of the above types of citations can be developed via the use of automated software (like Moz Local), by filling out forms directly on local business platforms manually, or via other methods of PR/marketing to various platforms.

Finally, citations and local business listings frequently appear without any action being taken by the business. Citations can result from automated aggregation and the flow of data from local business data platforms. For example, data on a site like Infogroup can flow down to another site like Superpages. This reality of how the web works makes it especially important for local businesses to take control of the accuracy of their data, so that inaccurate data is discovered and corrected, preventing customer loss, revenue loss, and any negative impact on local search rankings.