Business Directory Listings

Online directories are one of the most cost efficient ways to promote your websites and get placed on the front page of Google, inside of Google Places. Promoting your business site through online web directories might seem like a rather antiquated advertising method to include in a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, but there are some direct SEO benefits as well as other benefits to placing your site in trustworthy directories.


Authoritative directories can result in high-quality backlinks pointing back to your site, for one, and quality backlinks are one of the essential elements that factor into a site’s search engine rankings. But before discussing more specifically how online directories tie into SEM and SEO practices, let’s look at some of the more obvious benefits that online directories have to offer that are specific to the internet medium. These include:

Increased Consumer Access

Online directories allow advertisers potential access to consumers from all over the country and the globe, instead of just access to a specific local region, which is all printed directories usually provide. For small businesses that rely on ecommerce especially, online directories are a good way to promote your message.


Reach Your Target Audience

There are many different types of online directories out there. Specialized directories serve as centralized locations for businesses in a specific industry or location. This means that users of these directories already come, in a sense, pre-screened to be more receptive to your message.

Instant Updates

Online directory listings can be updated quickly and easily. If your business changes location, name, contact number or if you want to add information about offers and services to your listing, you can modify your listing accordingly and have those changes be immediately visible to consumers.

Expiration

Many online directories host listings indefinitely. Print directories, on the other hand, usually expire after a year.


Room for Additional Info

Online directories usually allow you to post much more additional information about your business and its offerings than traditional directories.
Now, in terms of how directory listings contribute to search engine rankings, it has to do, as noted previously, with a site’s ability to generate authoritative backlinks. Backlinks are essentially links from other websites that point traffic to your site. These are also referred to as incoming links or inbound links.

Major search engines like Google and Yahoo! evaluate the merit of a web site, in large part, according to the quantity and quality of that site’s backlinks. The higher the number of backlinks and the higher the backlinks’ quality, the higher a site’s search engine rankings will be. With that in mind, directories are some of the best places to have linking to you. Authoritative directories, especially ones that are relevant to your industry, translate into authoritative backlinks.

Thus, the potential traffic you generate by using online directories comes not just from the people browsing through the directories themselves, but from the people who find you in search engines as a result of your site obtaining a higher ranking with the help of authoritative links garnered via trustworthy directories. At Marketing Aftermath, we have an extensive list of directories through which we promote client websites. It’s all part of the larger, comprehensive Search Engine Marketing strategy we implement in all of our clients’ SEO campaigns.

 

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