We thought we would test a few out.
There are lots of good articles around on UK business directories and if they are any use for SEO, online presence etc. In fact enough articles to feel as though it would be worthwhile testing a few directories ourselves.
FYI. This post does not cover Google My Business. If you are not listed on Google My Business please get started now, it is very worthwhile. The aim of this post is to list some of the others around and start testing to see if they generate any traffic. If we see any success we can start to look into more.
Before you start be ready to make a list of where you are adding yourself so you can go back and amend as you see fit. Directories are littered with out of date listings and owners with no idea that they actually exist.
When you visit a directory site its worthwhile searching for yourself first to see if you already have a listing, duplication isn’t good. So where have we listed ourselves…
Bing Places
Simple to use, free and requires verification. Pretty much as you would expect from a major search engine and is probably a must have to be honest, even though Google dominates in the UK Bing is still a major player.
Thomson Local
Very basic indeed without paying for an enhanced listing, probably not worth it but for the purpose of balance we persevered.
192.com
Free, simple to use. The interface is not great, as you would expect there is a big gap in user experience between the bigger and smaller search engines.
All in London
Not for B2B people like us so we didn’t go ahead but give it a go if you are in the retail or hospitality space.
Approved Business
Free, simple set up, not much to report good or bad and the results will tell us if its been worthwhile spending five minutes setting up.
bizify
We searched for ourselves, no result. We searched for website developers in Brentford, no result, We searched for website developers in London, no result. We moved on and didn’t list ourselves.
Cylex
Lots of adverts, fiddly, the user interface is not great. It does allow you to add a lot of information but seemed a bit overwhelming.
And we found ourselves listed with a very out of date address, rookie mistake!
Freeindex
Repetitive and not user friendly. Found it strange that you had to write specific text as you couldn’t simply copy and paste your existing content. (You can get round this by simply dragging and dropping)
yell.com
Very good, easy to add detail and quite intuitive, this will probably be added to the must have collection.
And that’s it for now, we will be checking the stats over the next few weeks to see if we have any glimmers of hope.