How Small Businesses Can Leverage Local Directory Listings to Their Advantage?

Local directory listing is an essential traffic-generating channel particularly for small independent businesses that serve a specific geographic territory. For brick-and-mortar start-ups, it is an affordable method of generating high-quality leads relevant to your business. As opposed to general directories open to all geographies, local listings increase your region-specific online visibility.

What Local Directories Mean to Your Business?

By allowing you to add important details, such as firm name, business category, phone numbers, product / service descriptions, e-mail addresses, and working hours, amongst others, manual local directory submissions help increase the local search visibility of your business. Some directories also allow you to add pictures and other content for added appeal. Furthermore, leading search engines place high importance on backlinks that come from such directories. So, when your site details are regularly posted to such directories, chances are that your firm can be found on the front-page search results even when a broader search term is queried.

What Should You Keep in Mind?

• Always submit to local directories with high PageRank and impressive Alexa rankings. Some of the most reputed ones include Google+ Local, Yelp, Bing Local, Yahoo! Local, Foursquare, CitySearch, and Manta.
• Always use a steady pulse of submissions over a longer time frame rather than heavily concentrating too many posts in a shorter time frame.
• Always keep your business name, address, and contact details consistent for all listings to uphold your firm’s reputation.
• Always make each submission as thorough as possible. Details, such as business name, logo, address, working hours, listing title, business description, business category, products / services, and photos (whenever applicable) should be accurately filled.
• Always avoid submitting the same titles and descriptions to different directory listing sites. Try to vary your anchor texts whilst keeping your keywords and search phrases intact.

What Local Directories Mean to Your Target Audience?

Whilst getting your firm listed on local online directories immensely benefits your lead generation and SEO efforts, the end consumers of these directories -- your target audience -- gain a lot from them. Firstly, these directories help people search what they require in their locality rather than scanning other general sources which would provide a lot of irrelevant results. In addition to this, many reputed sites allow visitors to rate a company, write reviews on businesses, add comments about firms, and share the postings to their contact lists. So, as someone searching for a business requirement, online directories provide high-quality results. Furthermore, the more positive editorial reviews and comments a business posting gets on such sites, the higher the ranking.

As a result, listing your business on local online directories is a proven method of collecting validated one-way links to your website, build online credibility, and increase your business’ local online visibility.

Bal Rai is an Internet Marketing Consultant at eTrack Media, a leading SEO company in Redditch, UK.