The Most Important Local Business Directories for SEO

We’ve updated this post for 2016. Check it out here. While many of your potential customers search Google for information on local services, inevitably a large portion of them find their way to a local business directory. Many of these directories not only have substantial brands/marketing budgets to drive traffic, but they also do […]

By Yext

Sep 24, 2012

3 min

We've updated this post for 2016. Check it out here.

While many of your potential customers search Google for information on local services, inevitably a large portion of them find their way to a local business directory. Many of these directories not only have substantial brands/marketing budgets to drive traffic, but they also do well in organic search rankings for important search terms. So even if you can't get your site ranked high for a specific search term, you can appear on the local directory site that ranks for that term. Perhaps even more important is that links to your site and mentions of your business (aka "Local Citations") can help your site rank well in both "national" organic search as well as in the Google Places results (I still can't bring myself to say the "Google+ Local" results).

So with this in mind, we thought it would be helpful to provide a list of the best local business directories for your SEO efforts. While other sites have put together similar lists, invariably they focus on a grab-bag of sites, many of which are irrelevant. We wanted to go for only those that are truly important and worth spending time on.

We have divided them into two lists:

  1. The Largest Local Business Directories in the US

  2. The Top U.S. Local Citation Sources

The 55 Largest Local Business Directories in the US These local directory sites, according to Compete.com, have the largest amount of traffic and are listed by size – largest first. In cases where the site is more than a directory, such as Mapquest, we have tried to estimate what % of their traffic goes to the directory. Improving your presence on these directories means your business will be exposed to a wide audience of local searchers.

  1. Google Places (aka Google+ Local)

  2. Facebook

  3. LinkedIn

  4. Yellowpages.com

  5. Yelp

  6. Local.com

  7. WhitePages.com

  8. Manta

  9. SuperPages

  10. CitySearch

  11. Patch

  12. City-Data

  13. MerchantCircle

  14. Yellowbook.com

  15. Yahoo Local

  16. Mapquest

  17. Topix

  18. DexKnows

  19. Yellow.com

  20. BBB.org

  21. ServiceMagic

  22. Angieslist

  23. AreaConnect

  24. Foursquare

  25. AmericanTowns

  26. BizJournals

  27. LocalGuides

  28. 411.com

  29. Yellowpages.aol.com

  30. Insider Pages

  31. MagicYellow

  32. Hotfrog.com

  33. Mojopages

  34. Switchboard

  35. Demandforce

  36. MojoPages

  37. Bundle

  38. Metromix

  39. Yellowbot

  40. Kudzu

  41. ShowMeLocal

  42. ChamberofCommerce

  43. LocalPages

  44. YellowMoxie

  45. Phonenumber.com

  46. Best of the Web Local

  47. Yellowise

  48. GetFave

  49. Tupalo

  50. ZipLocal

  51. EZLocal

  52. CitySquares

  53. USCIty.net

  54. LocalDatabase

Top U.S. Local Directory Citation Sources GetListed.org and Whitespark.ca recently released some amazing data on the top local citation sources by city and by category. We thought it would be interesting to take that data and determine which directories on average had the most citation influence in the entire country. While it's good to focus on your service area and category for citation building, in most cases, regardless of your location or industry, these are the sites you should almost always include while citation-building.

  1. Yellowpages.com

  2. Yelp

  3. SuperPages

  4. CitySearch

  5. Yahoo Local

  6. Facebook

  7. DexKnows

  8. Manta

  9. BBB.org

  10. YouTube

  11. City-Data

  12. Yellowbook.com

  13. Angieslist

  14. MerchantCircle

  15. ServiceMagic

While a number of expected brands made the list, Facebook and YouTube are perhaps the two biggest surprises here. Then again, they are two of the biggest sites in the world and each has local business content, so perhaps it's no surprise that they would emerge as important citation sources.

How does your business appear on all these sites? Click here to scan your business. It's fast and free.

Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a SEO consultancy focused on enterprise search engine optimization for local media properties and multi-location businesses. He also has a new blog about Apple Maps.

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