Wikipedia pages are a part of a company’s online presence that often get forgotten about amid the focus on Google My Business, local pack listings and social media, but it’s an area that is definitely worth exploring. 

While it’s not possible for all companies, there are a number of advantages to having a Wikipedia presence, and many business owners are surprised to learn that it can also be beneficial for SEO.

Advantage 1: Perception, perception, perception

While it still has its critics, Wikipedia’s reputation for credibility has improved over time as edit controls have become stricter, and vandalism of pages has (like the popularity of Bebo and Myspace) declined considerably since peaking in 2008. Aside from the company’s own website, Wikipedia is the logical place to look up information on a business or business leader, and of course information from a third-party source is more credible than from the company’s own mouth.

Advantage 2: Brand awareness

A business having its own Wikipedia page, or having a Wikipedia presence in any capacity, therefore confers credibility and can help to position the company as an expert in their industry. The exclusivity of having to meet notability criteria significantly enriches a company’s online presence; while anyone can have a social media presence, and get listed on Yell and Google My Business, a Wikipedia presence suggests that the company is especially important and, by association, trustworthy. In this way a strong Wikipedia presence can be invaluable for brand awareness and perception.

Advantage 3: SEO benefits

While a Wikipedia presence confers your company’s credibility to human users, search engines will be equally impressed by backlinks from Wikipedia. As the fifth-most visited website worldwide, Wikipedia receives an enormous amount of traffic and backlinks and this is reflected in its domain authority score of 100 (the maximum score possible). While links from Wikipedia are likely to be nofollow, they still look impressive in any backlink profile, and more importantly have the ability to drive significant amounts of qualified referral traffic to your website if you are linked from a relevant page.

Advantage 4: Part of the information graph

Wikipedia’s size and credibility also means that it is used by search engines to pull information on companies and people directly from Wikipedia into search results pages. Indeed, in 2017 Wikipedia claimed over 11% of all featured snippets in the U.S. – almost ten times as many as the next highest-performing site.

The information pulled from Wikipedia is displayed in knowledge panels or featured snippets and often includes key company details such as year founded, headquarters and logo, which is taken from the box of details that appears on the right-hand side of Wikipedia pages, known as an Infobox.

If you want to find out how to create a Wikipedia presence, read our detailed "how to" article here.