Directory Listings Worth Ten Minutes

Two different reasons to be listed

They get conflated, and separating them makes the decision easy.

People use it. Somebody genuinely browses that site to find a supplier, and being listed produces enquiries directly.

Search engines use it. Nobody visits it, and it contributes to the picture of your business being consistent and established.

A handful of directories do the first. Rather more do the second, weakly. The great majority do neither and exist to charge for submissions.

The ones that usually earn their place

• The major mapping and search listings, which are the foundation rather than a directory.
• Your industry association, if it publishes a member directory.
• Your local chamber of commerce.
• A trade certification body whose approved-installer list customers actually check.
• Supplier or manufacturer dealer locators, which are frequently authoritative.
• One or two well-known national directories in your category.

The fifth is under-used and often the most valuable. If you install a brand, being on their locator is a genuine referral source and carries real weight.

What to ignore

Being specific, since the offers are persistent.

Anybody phoning to say your listing is about to expire, which is a standard approach and usually not connected to any listing you have.

Services promising submission to two hundred directories. The number is the selling point precisely because the quality cannot be.

Directories with no visible traffic, no editorial standards, and a category structure that includes every trade in every town.

Anything asking for payment before telling you what the listing looks like or where it appears.

How to judge one in two minutes

1. Search for your trade and town and see whether the directory appears at all.
2. Look at a competitor's entry and judge whether it looks maintained.
3. Check whether entries carry real detail or are auto-generated stubs.
4. See whether it has been updated in the last year.
5. Ask whether you have ever used it yourself to find a supplier.

The first is the strongest signal. A directory that does not appear when somebody searches for your trade is not being seen by the people you want.

The fifth is a fair test too. If you would not use it, the reasoning that your customers might needs supporting.

What being listed involves

Ten minutes each, done properly.

Your details copied exactly from your reference document rather than typed fresh. A description written for a person. A link to the most relevant page rather than always the homepage. A photograph if the entry allows one.

And the login recorded, because in three years you will want to update an address and will not remember which of these you signed up for.

That last step is what turns a directory listing from a small asset into a small liability, since an entry you cannot edit carries your old details indefinitely.

A worked example

A window installer who had paid a company for a directory package two years earlier.

The package had produced entries on a large number of sites. Checking the analytics, all of them together had sent eleven visitors in two years, none of whom made contact.

Meanwhile he was not on the dealer locator of the two manufacturers whose products he installed, because nobody had told him those existed.

Adding both took twenty minutes. The manufacturer locators produced several enquiries within the first month, from people who had chosen a product and were looking for somebody nearby to fit it.

Those enquiries were also better than average, because the customer had already decided what they wanted.

Two years of paid submissions had been worth less than twenty minutes of the right ones.

The ones that list you without asking

A category people do not expect: entries you never created.

Many directories generate listings automatically from public data. You may appear on a dozen sites you have never visited, with details taken from somewhere years ago.

Those are worth finding, because they carry whatever information was correct at the time. An auto-generated entry with a previous address is doing the same damage as a stale one you created.

Search your business name, and separately your phone number, to find them. Most offer a way to claim or correct the entry, sometimes requiring verification.

Where there is no way to correct it, an email to the site asking for a change or removal usually works, and where it does not, the entry is probably too obscure to matter anyway.

Do this once and note what you found. It is not worth repeating annually, and it is worth repeating after a move.

Paid entries, occasionally

Not all paid listings are worthless, and the test is the same as for anything else.

A paid entry is worth considering when the directory genuinely ranks for searches your customers make, when its entries are detailed rather than stubs, and when you can find out what a listing actually produced for somebody similar.

Ask for that last one directly. A directory confident in its traffic will answer; one selling volume will change the subject.

And treat it as advertising with a measurable outcome rather than as a permanent necessity. If it produces nothing in a year, stop.

Keeping them accurate

The part that matters more than the number.

Eight accurate entries are worth more than eighty, and considerably more than eighty of which sixty carry an old address.

When something changes, work through the list you kept. When you cannot access an entry, email the site and ask.

An entry you cannot edit is worse than no entry, so weigh that before signing up to something obscure. The cost is not the ten minutes; it is the decade of carrying details you can no longer change.

The goal throughout is the same as the wider consistency question, which is covered in your address in three places, written three ways.

An afternoon, once

The whole exercise is not ongoing work.

Do the six or eight that matter, record the logins, and leave it. Revisit when you move, change your number, or add a service worth listing.

Anything beyond that is somebody selling you volume, and volume was never the thing that produced enquiries.

If somebody offers to handle it for you, ask which specific directories they intend to submit to and why each one. A clear answer is a good sign. A number instead of a list is the whole answer you need.

Frequently asked questions

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