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While many of your potential customers search Google for information on local services, inevitably a large portion of them find their way to a local business directory listing (aka “online yellow pages” sites). Many of these directories not only have substantial brands/marketing budgets to drive traffic, but they also do well in organic search rankings for important local searches. So even if business owners can’t get their site ranked high for a specific search term, your local business listings and relevant business data (phone number, address, category, service offering, professional services, products, and services, etc.) can appear on the local directory site that ranks for that term. Perhaps even more important is that links to your site and mentions of your business (aka “Local Citations”) can help your site rank well in both “national” organic search as well as in the Google My Business (Google’s local listings) results.
So with this in mind, I thought it would be helpful to provide a list of the best local business directories for your SEO efforts. While other sites have put together similar lists of online listings, invariably they focus on a grab-bag of sites, many of which are irrelevant. We wanted to go for only those that are truly important and worth spending time on.
Check these sites to see if your business info is up to date. If not, update your business information asap. If you don’t have a listing on all of these sites, typically businesses can create listings for themselves (check if the site offers free listings) or they may need to work through a local data provider to get listed on them.
We have divided them into two lists:
The Largest Local Business Directories in the US
The Top U.S. Local Citation Sources
The 55 Largest Local Business Directories in the US These local directory sites, according to Compete.com, have the largest amount of traffic and are listed by size – largest first. In cases where the site is more than a directory, such as Mapquest, we have tried to estimate what % of their traffic goes to the directory. Improving your presence on these directories means your business information will be exposed to a wide audience of local searchers.
CitySearch CitySearch is run by CityGrid, which in turn pulls data from ExpressUpdate. There, I just saved you 15 minutes of searching
Mapquest
Topix
DexKnows
BBB.org
ServiceMagic
Angieslist
AreaConnect
Foursquare
AmericanTowns
BizJournals
LocalGuides
411.com
Yellowpages.aol.com
Insider Pages
MagicYellow
Hotfrog.com
LocalStack
Switchboard
Demandforce
MojoPages
Metromix
Yellowbot
ShowMeLocal
LocalPages
Best of the Web Local
Yellowise
GetFave
Tupalo
ZipLocal
EZLocal
CitySquares
USCIty.net
LocalDatabase
Top U.S. Local Directory Citation Sources GetListed.org and Whitespark.ca recently released some amazing data on the top local citation sources by city and by category. We thought it would be interesting to take that data and determine which directories on average had the most citation influence in the entire country. While it’s good to focus on your service area and category for citation building, in most cases, regardless of your location or industry, these are the sites you should almost always include while citation-building.
Yellowpages.com
Yelp
SuperPages
CitySearch
Yahoo Local
Facebook
DexKnows
Manta
BBB.org
YouTube
City-Data
Yellowbook.com
Angieslist
MerchantCircle
NextDoor
ServiceMagic
While a number of expected brands made the list, Facebook and YouTube are perhaps the two biggest surprises here. Then again, they are two of the biggest sites in the world and each has local business content, so perhaps it’s no surprise that they would emerge as important citation sources.
Previously published on Yext.com
Credit: Andrew Shotland