Generic citations are common and typically national business directories such as Yelp.com, Manta.com, insiderpages.com, local.com, kudzu.com, thomsonlocal.com, yellowpages.ca, etc.

While generic directories will give you a decent start to your citation building activities, it is important that you submit your business to niche or industry specific directories that can give you higher value citations. There are many directories focused on specific industries like Home Improvement, Health, Legal etc. 

There are directories and blogs for specific locations – as broad as region (Northwest, Southern) and as specific as locality (Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York City).

Being listed in the smallest ones allows interaction with your direct neighbours and community while the larger ones have more reach.

An unstructured citation is a mention of your business name, address, phone number in a blog post or a newspaper, event listing websites, job websites, government sites, or really on any webpage that is not a directory. These are referred to as unstructured citations and can be extremely valuable to your local rankings.