How to Choose Business Directories

Online business directories are growing fast and are becoming the information hub of consumers in search for local businesses, services or products. A survey done in the United Kingdom tells us that almost twenty million local customers are turning to online business listings each month.

It is clear that the old yellow pages are fast becoming obsolete because of their limited space. Online business listings can hold a lot of information like a description of your store, service or product, the opening hours of your business, some price listings, the location of your store, your photo or your store’s photo and of course a link to your site, if you have one.

Business directories, including the free ones, permit so much information about your business that it can be really stupid to pass off such a great deal, especially if you are a local based store. By adding your store to such a listing, you become more visible which can only mean one thing: that you are going to have new customers very soon at your doorstep.

When you decide that adding your store or office to an online directory is a good idea, you should do a little research about them. A good and easy way of finding out which business listings are popular and have a large number of audiences is typing in a search engine, like Google, your ‘business type’ and ‘your location’ (for example: real estate Leeds). The first three results are the ones to focus on.

Now that you have found the first three most visited and popular business directories, the next step to do is claiming your business to all of them, but be very careful to write all your information correctly: your address, your phone number, the name of your business and so on. Furthermore, it is really important that after you send all your information to the online directories, to check for a confirmation in your inbox from each and every online business listing and follow all the instructions that provided so that you can finish your registration.

Another important thing you should do is profit from the fact that you have more space on the online business listingsthan on the normal paper ones and list as much information as you can. Use this opportunity to personalise your listing to make it more relatable to your customers by using pictures, clickable content, lists of services and facilities and a nice description and so on. You can even ask your regular customers to go online and leave you a favourable review so that the new possible customers know that others have been to your store and had a pleasant experience there. It really helps future customers to hear about other people’s experience in a particular place that they may want to visit too.