The Top Business Directory Listing Websites

Targeting a small set of high quality business directories that provide free listings will help drive traffic, while increasing the number of backlinks pointing to a website. Since the number of quality links to a website helps search engines determine the importance and therefore the search ranking of the website, this can only be a good thing.

The directories below are those I recommend UK-based clients list their businesses on. At the time of writing, all of them offer a free listing service.

The Directories

Google Places – When you search Google for a business and a location, say “Removal companies in Newcastle upon Tyne”, at the top of the search results page you will be given a list of local businesses with a map. These results are driven by Google Places. It’s free to add a listing and mark the business on a map.

Infoserve - As well as providing their own business search, Infoserve also supplies the core data to Yahoo Local. Since Yahoo is the second most important search engine, it is definitely worth adding a free listing on Infoserve.

Thomson Local – One of the most popular and comprehensive business directory websites, Thomson Local offers a free business listing.

Yell – Much like Thomson Local, Yell offers many paid-for services but also a free standard listing service to get a business’ details included in Yell.com, Yellow Pages and the 118 24 7 telephone service.

Market Location – This service provides data for Microsoft’s recently launched Bing Local UK and Multimap listings.

Touch Local – TouchLocal lets people review, rate and recommend businesses that they have used, enabling it’s users to make an informed choice based on the experiences of others.

Scoot – Creating a Scoot listing provides several methods of reaching potential clients. These include searching via. the Scoot website, a 118 telephone service, Vodaphone service and an iPhone application..

DMOZ – The Open Directory Project is the largest human-edited directory on the web. It isn’t often used as a directory like the sites listed above, so is not going to directly bring much traffic to a website. The benefit from being listed on DMOZ is that it’s data is available to be downloaded and used by anyone – one particular user of the data is Google. Having a listing on DMOZ can therefore lead to lots of inbound links and be gold for a website’s search engine ranking.

Of course, the list above isn’t necessarily the definitive answer for every business – there may be other specialist directories that focus on a particular kind of business or service (e.g. a directory of personal trainers) that will benefit certain businesses. But in my experience, it’s a pretty good starting point.