The Best Review Citation Sources in Canada and the UK

Hot Dang! It has been 6 months since I published my list of the best US review citation sources – 6 months it took me to get to this. Crazy.

You may remember, in January I caught the data bug, and put together a list of review sources based on these buggers:

UPDATE: Sadly, the above no longer exists. Your best bet is to run your competitors citations, just as you would while doing competitive analysis, and checking out where they have reviews among those citations. Jotting it down, and returning to it later.

These are sources where one’s business data has appeared, and Goog has matched the data up to this Google My Business listing. Note: while I will call them review sources, in many cases, there were NO reviews to be found. So, we know, when it comes to local data Google finds valuable, the don’t discriminate at the review level, NOR at the type of site level. In fact, some sites they scraped were just plain shady. You’d almost think Google likes spam… ;)

A quick review of how we arrived at this data/list, we, in this order, AND NOT MANUALLY (thank god!):

1. Pushed a button, did a jig (possibly several), and watched our scraper do…
2. Applied, where possible, a close to as, city specific proxy
3. Opened up maps.google.ca (or .co.uk)
4. Conducted a search for [cityname, state/province/etc] + [category] ie. Vancouver, BC plumbers
5. Opened up the top ten ranked listings on the first 3 pages (30 listings per query)
6. scraped occurrences of properties appearing in “reviews from around the web.”
7. Ranked ‘em like a boss

Note, this, like our previous study, was based on the category list found in David Mihm and Darren Shaw’s study. These guys are an endless source of inspiration.

Okay, so let me elaborate on the last item (Ranked ‘em like a boss), as it brings everything together. We ranked our UK and Canadian data by assigning 1 point to a property every time it showed up in the first 3 pages of places results. We did this to get a baseline for how popular each property is with the search engines. This is how we did it in our previous research.

Okay, you’re bored stiff. Without further ado, after having analysed nearly 250,000 listings, I give you our lists:

Best Canadian Review Citation Sources

This list didn’t surprise me much at all, and overall, I think it is a pretty well balanced list. Tripadvisor is always a big one. Qype too, but it didn’t make the top 50 in this case. Things get a bit more interesting in the top 100, and even beyond. Like my US research, there are tons of outliers you’d NEVER think to submit to – nor would your competitors ;)

Want 500+ more killer, Canadian review citation sources?

Top UK Review Citation Review Sources

Looking back on this, I think I would try and categorize the types of properties. For example, break up all the hotel related ones, all the restaurant related ones. I think in my next iteration I will. For the time being, you are going to have to do a bit of digging yourself. Fortunately, I have laid it out fairly simply for you, so it shouldn’t be too hard to identify which are specific to you. Finally, it’s worth mentioning, that even if you don’t quite “fit in” on a property, that doesn’t mean you won’t get reviews there, and it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t a valuable citation source.

Want 500+ more killer, UK review citation sources?

What the heck would I want UK or CAN data for? Give me US data! Get, get, GET IT!

Updated June 8, 2015 by Adam Steele