Local Citations.

A citation is any mention of a company's contact details outside its own website. Classically these are directories such as local.ch or search.ch and industry-specific portals, plus map services like Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap and the pages of associations and chambers of commerce. A distinction is drawn between structured citations, where the data sits in defined fields, and unstructured ones, where it appears in the running text of an article. Both serve the same purpose: they confirm independently that this business exists at this address.

The value today is a different one from ten years ago. As a direct ranking lever citations have weakened; as a basis for trust they have become more important. Google compares the details across several sources, and contradictions create uncertainty and weaken the match. For AI assistants this holds even more sharply, because they take their information from exactly these sources. A wrong phone number in an old directory can therefore surface in an AI answer months later, long after your own website was corrected.

For Switzerland the list is manageable, and that is an advantage rather than a limitation. The important ones are the Google Business Profile, local.ch and search.ch, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect, Moneyhouse and the commercial register entry, plus OpenStreetMap and two to five portals from your own industry. Maintain those cleanly and identically and you have secured most of the effect. Bulk submission to hundreds of international directories achieves little and mainly creates maintenance work and new sources of error.

A case from practice. After moving from Zurich to Zollikon, a business updated its website and its Google Business Profile but forgot four older directory entries. For months afterwards assistants named the old address, because several sources still carried it and the majority carried the day. The clean-up was unspectacular: a list of every entry that could be found, correction or deletion, then a check eight weeks later. This kind of tidying is the least glamorous and simultaneously most effective part of local SEO.