List yourself in online directories
Clients often ask how to rise above the clutter and get listed higher in search engines. One tride and true rule (especially with Google’s ranking method) over the last few years has been to have as many websites as possible, linking to you. How do you accomplish this?
There are several things that you can do, from asking friends, family, clients, associates and other business colleagues to link to you from their site, and/or write about you in blogs, news articles, etc., to having media outlets publish your press releases, to making sure that you have regularly updating content on your own site. In future articles we plan to cover some of these methods in more detail, as well as other ways you can make sure your company makes it to the top of the list.
There’s one little trick, which is often overlooked that I want to mention today, and that is listing yourself in several online directories. There are quite a few of them out there — Verizon, Google, Yahoo, AT&T’s Yellow Pages, MerchantCircle and Angie’s List are some of the most popular directories that people use to find companies and services in their local area, often as an alternative to picking up a big bulky phone book.
So, where to list?
What I would do to find that out is to use the search engines themselves. Often what you find in the first 15-25 listings for what you might be looking for, are listings in various directories. Let’s say I own a pet store in Tulsa. People who would be my potential customers might do a search for,
“pet store” tulsa
If I search for that phrase in Google, I find Google’s local listings for pet stores, as well as
www.petdogandcatservices.com
petcarechannel.localwin.com
tulsa.citysearch.com
www.dogfriendly.com
www.superpages.com
…all in the first 20 or so listings, some of them huge nation-wide directories, some of them small individual or locally-owned directories. So if I want to increase the chances that my store will show up, and that potential customers would come to my store, I’ll want to make sure that my store is listed in as many directories as I can.
The strategy here is, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. I know I can’t probably beat out www.superpages.com (Verizon’s online phone directory) and be listed above them; they’ve been around longer, are a bigger comapny and probably have a larger marketing budget that I do. BUt what I can do is make sure that I’m listed in their directory. If I can take advantage of the fact that most of these websites allow me to list for free, I can be in, let’s say a dozen directories, all of them pointing to my website. This spreads the word about my business, links other high-ranking sites to mine, and increases the chances that someone will find my store when they want to buy a pet in Tulsa.
‘Sound good?
Try it yourself!
If you’re not already listed in Google’s Local Directory, you can go to: https://www.google.com/local/add/ and fill in their form to be include in, “Google Maps”. You’ll be asked to verify your business location via a postcard that Google will send you in the mail. The next time you ask a new customer where they found your business, see if they say that they found you in a local online directory listing!