How To Take Advantage Of Local Directories For Your Business

How to take advantage of Local Directories to make your small business work. Find out tips, details, and strategies on the PMI Blog.

For a company, being listed in Local Directories is still a great way to connect with potential customers in its vicinity. Let’s now see together how it is possible to exploit these resources to obtain more visibility.

What are Local Directories

Local Directories are portals that present a geographically organized list of physical stores, restaurants, or businesses that offer services locally. In these portals, shops, restaurants, or businesses present themselves through cards that include relevant information about the businesses themselves, such as name, physical address, and telephone number. Taking advantage of these aggregators for your digital presence allows you to intervene in Local SEO, making yourself visible to users who are looking for a specific activity in their vicinity. Action that happens more and more frequently and is often supported by voice search.

Local Directories: where to insert the activity

There are many Local Directories on the internet, so it is important to select the ones where to place your business. Your listings must appear in major search engines, starting with Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which have different indices of local business listings.

For the choice of Local Directories, it is necessary to pay attention to some parameters.

Specifically, it is necessary to consider whether:

• it is financed by a large company (quality index);
• has been on the web for a long time;
• has adequate visibility and is positively evaluated by internet users;
• has strict guidelines for the inclusion of activities (another quality index);
• it has a clean navigation structure, and if it authoritatively presents itself.

Another useful tip is to enter your business in those Local Directories, which, in addition to meeting the requirements listed above, are specifically dedicated to the reference niche of the business itself.

A useful strategy to understand the “right” Local Directory for your business is to analyze the behavior of competing businesses and understand where they are present in order to be able to take “inspiration.”

How to take advantage of Local Directories

Inserting your business into a Local Directory is easy and intuitive, but you have to pay attention to some aspects: first of all, you need to enter the exact name of the business and the exact physical address of the same. Likewise, the telephone number must include the area code. However, the use of a toll-free number is not recommended.

In addition to the three basic information (name of the business, physical address, and telephone number), the opening hours, photos and videos of the business, and other relevant data must also be added to the card.

Some Local Directories require you to select a category to describe the activity; in this regard, the advice is to be as precise as possible and compatible with the options the Local Directory offers.

It is also possible that you may be asked to prove that you are actually the business owner: this can be done by sending a code, a text or voice message, or an e-mail containing the instructions to follow. Once this step is also completed, the card will receive approval. At that point, it will be possible to manage it at any time, verifying the information entered and updating it if necessary.

Keeping your records up to date within the Local Directories and making sure that the information does not differ from one directory to another is of fundamental importance. This means that you will need to update your records whenever the name of the business, physical address, telephone number, or opening hours change.

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