Image Credit: Blumenthals.com “I Can See the Future of Your Google Reviews”
Many small businesses and bloggers are worried about building links without first taking the basic step of getting themselves listed in free directories and the most relevant (to them) of the paid directories.
In spite of the widespread belief that “directories are bad” that is NOT what Google said and if you still believe that I encourage you to watch the video further down in this post of Matt Cutts explaining why quality, paid directories are still beneficial for SEO.
How Bloggers Can Benefit
Bloggers, you can benefit from getting these local listings, too. You do have to have a physical address and phone number to publish. (There is a business opportunity more need to be offering: business addresses and phone services.)
I strongly encourage bloggers to add getting directory listings to their skill set so they can assist their favorite small businesses, generate extra income, or even make a living offering directory listing services.
Many small business owners do NOT have the time
or desire to learn how to do directory listings themselves.
As inflation bites into disposable incomes and more are underemployed and unemployed, even traditional businesses that think they have plenty of customers need to find new ones.
Directory listings should be their first priority – and you providing
them can be yours – because you will be supporting your
community and earning a nice income, too.Even if you don’t want to do this yourself, you can recommend directories
and UBL to make affiliate income from multiple programs.
Universal Business Listings (UBL)
Click this banner to go to UBL and get your listing now.
First start with all the free listings you can get in major directories. If you have no money at all you can do this manually, but that is a serious waste of your time when you can pay UBL as little as $75 to get you in hundreds of directories.
You can not manually do what they do for you because you can’t find all the sites that are using the databases they feed. They have come a long way from where they started when I first started recommending them years ago.
Now they provide feedback on where your listings appear and make it easy to ping all the directories annually or more often. This IS important and I highly recommend it because that tells the search engines you’re still in business and moves your listings up!
Even the smallest business can afford the $75 minimum
cost of UBL if they make it a priority – and they should!
If manually claiming your listings in the most important business directories is a headache you’d rather let someone else deal with you can use one of their premium options and let UBL do it for you – or offer this as a service to generate more income for you.
UBL has an affiliate program, so even if you don’t want to offer services I encourage you to do those reading your blog a favor and write about and recommend directory listings and UBL.
I know many are going to say, “Just focus on your Google Plus Local listing” (formerly Google Places and before that Google Local) bccause of Google’s monopoly on traffic
For your sake and the sake of any business you advise,
please do not rely only on Google because relying
on any one entity puts your business at risk!What happens if you get all your traffic from
Google and they stop sending it?
See my UBL case study showing that just using UBL and doing no other link building, this Texas Gazebo builder went from getting to 96% of their traffic from Google to receiving 75 visitors from other sources for every 100 visitors they got from Google.
When Google’s Panda or Penguin bites, that could mean the difference between staying in business and closing your doors! I will be doing additional UBL case studies this year so if you’re not convinced yet you will be.
QUALITY PAID DIRECTORIES
Listing your business in the best paid directories is STILL a good idea, and once again I am going to share this video of Matt Cutts explaining Google’s position on them:
Because keeping small businesses IN business is so important to economies and creating a better world, I have spent dozens of hours contacting the Top 50 Paid Directories hand selected from the SEOMoz list plus some recommended by others.
I contacted all of them and asked for discounts to share with small businesses. Here are the listing deals I was able to obtain for not only my readers, but for the readers of any blogger who wishes to take my research and use it in their own writing.
Not only did I get the discounts – I also found the pricing whenever possible AND I am adding the affiliate programs all into one spreadsheet you can request from me – or download immediately by subscribing to the DIRJournal.com Business Journal blog. I will add the links for that later today.
BUSINESS DIRECTORY DEALS
- Directory Journal – 20% off all directory types – Discount Code DJ20GM
- Alive Directory – 20% off all directory types – Discount Code ADC2013
- Web-Designers-Directory.org – 25% off – Discount Code AVOFF25
- ArgusVision.net – 25% off – Discount Code AVOFF25 (same owner so same code)
- OnTopList – $30 off premium listings; $10 off regular listings – Discount Code ontoplistcode
- Abilogic – 15% off – Discount Code ABIKey13
- BusyBits – 30% off – Discount Code 2013
- HotvsNot – 20% off – Discount Code GM20HVN
- Gii.in – 20% off
- City Star – 30% off – Use this custom page to get the 30% discount
- Jasmine Directories – 30% off – Discount Code JD2013
- Aviva Directory – $20 off annual or permanent listings – Discount Code growmap
- Ezilon – 30% off – Discount Code s1z8v if you use PayPal or SMV8Z if you pay by credit card.
- Wow Directory and Skaffe – WoW Directory and Skaffe Directory have free submission reviews on weekends and we feel that free submission is the best possible discount. Free submissions are normally processed within couple of weeks if accepted.
I will add expiration dates and details about these directories in another post and link to that so that I only have one to keep updated. Any additional offers I receive will be added.
This post is useful for verifying the quality of directories: Link Building 101: How to Evaluate the Power of Directories.
If you have any questions about these discounts,
ask them in the comments or contact me.
{ 58 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
This is a very helpful article. People thought that submitting their business websites to directories is no longer effective and do not add value to their website.
Lei Broch would love you to read ..New Release
Very impressive referral numbers here. I have used UBL before and, although I believe I got my money’s worth, I didn’t see results as near as good.
Perhaps my copy was not written as well.. hmm
Aaron would love you to read ..Healthcare Bluebook Gives You Fair Prices for Medical Treatment
Twitter: GrowMap
April 11, 2013 at 9:34 am
Hi Aaron,
What is really key is doing your keyword research well. You want to weave all the keyword phrases that are important to you into the content. Be sure to include locations in your listings for as many cities, counties, metro areas, etc. as will fit.
When there are too many cities I drop the smallest ones with the lowest likelihood of hiring that business. For example, if the client is a contractor of luxury homes I would drop the smallest rural areas least likely to hire them.
List all the products and brands you sell. Brainstorm how people who are NOT in your industry would search for what you do. Ask friends, family, co-workers – anyone really – what they would type into Google if they wanted to hire you. You will get answers that surprise you!
Category choice is critical and for some industries that is really hard to do because there are too many or not enough. I recommend going back and optimizing the most important local directories. Back when I last researched I published a post on what they were then: http://growmap.com/top-10-local-search-directories-by-importance/
GrowMap would love you to read ..How to Write Better Email Autoresponders and Captivate Audiences
Thanks for your reply. I certainly see the value of including as many pertinent high traffic keywords as possible, but I have a hard time including as many as I would like without the copy sounding too optimized. I have heard that Google frowns on over optimized pages, but I have not seen much proof in my work yet. Although, I think my copy usually falls on the under-optimized side.
Where do you stand on the scale of keyword optimization?
Aaron would love you to read ..Healthcare Bluebook Gives You Fair Prices for Medical Treatment
Twitter: GrowMap
April 11, 2013 at 8:42 pm
Hello Aaron,
Here is an example of a UBL listing I researched and created: http://webcard.ubl.org/438065/Scotts-Valley/CA/Santa-Cruz-Construction-Guild
I write for humans, but I do use the keyword phrase I’m targeting on each page or post. Here are a couple of posts you may find helpful:
Thanks, just what I was looking for
Aaron would love you to read ..Healthcare Bluebook Gives You Fair Prices for Medical Treatment
Thanks for the case study on UBL. I have used them in the past, and generally recommend them for small businesses, but never had much concrete data that they were cost effective.
UBL is fairly cost effective marketing for small businesses, although I don’t know if it is always as effective as it proved to be for the gazebo company cited in your post.
Aaron would love you to read ..Healthcare Bluebook Gives You Fair Prices for Medical Treatment
However, if you give paid for your listing, it is important to keep in mind that, only the good business listings are crawled first in the Business To Business directory. The preferences are given based on the listings and the worst listings are marked as spam in the directory.
A nice discounts for paid Business To Business Directory. I think so, this paid business directory helps us to boost our website traffic.
Well these directories seems great as I have read that there are many directories have been kicked by google but these looks nice and the discount is not more than a perfect income if you are have right visitors on your blog or any site.
monaedward would love you to read ..The matched home business companies are not get rich quick schemes, they are work hard for executive income schemes.
I have considered doing this but is it really worth the cost? With so many directories charging I would imagine it would be a decent amount of money without knowing what benefit my website will gain. Also how can you tell if they’re really working. These paid services need to generate reports and URLs so show that you’re really in these directories they submitted.
Thanks a lot for sharing the discounts. I’m currently in the process of filling my new blog with share-worthy content. But when I get to the point of full-blown marketing, I’ll remember to come back for those links. I’m not a big fan of directories, but I know that once you establish authority, they become more beneficial.
However, for small businesses, I’d advise anyone to go ahead and list their business. If only to be there when someone local searches for what you sell.
Nikki would love you to read ..Metrics Make Me Merry
business directory discount seems to be very helpful in getting a good business. it gives us a good suggestion to have a multi directional efforts with a single goal,,, to enhance the traffic…
← Previous Comments
{ 2 trackbacks }