What are the different types of Business Directories, and how to choose the right ones?

4 min readMar 16, 2022

Business directories are websites where the businesses within a particular group list themselves for a better online presence. If you are a small business owner, it is important to add your business to relevant business directories. Small business listings will help potential customers find your product/service on the web. With us dependent on our phones for almost anything now, not having small business listings is inexcusable.

Business directories can be online or offline. For example, Yellow Pages is an offline business directory that helps you find and contact businesses in your locality. But most business directories are online nowadays and hence easy to access. If you are a small business owner, you should find the right directory to list your business.

Types of Business Directories

If you are thinking about adding your business to a directory, you should take into account the type of business, scope and the reason why you are listing it with the directory. This will help you determine the right directory to create the small business listing.

There are different types of web directories and each has its own purpose. We will discuss some of the important ones here.

1. Education Directory Website

This directory consists of a list of educational institutions. This list might include online institutions, schools, colleges, universities and more. These are also categorized perfectly so that the user can easily find the ones they are searching for.

2. Reviews Website

This type of web directory involves getting reviews from the customers about businesses. The business owners create listings with these sites and their clients/customers review their product/service on these sites.

Yelp is one of the hottest review sites of recent times. Review sites help build brand personality and also help gain more customers. Most people tend to check out other people’s experiences with a particular product/service before getting involved with it. Quality review sites do not let the business owners remove or modify the customer reviews.

3. Local Business Directory

A local business directory has business listings from a certain locality, industry or niche. For example, there might be a local business directory that focuses on businesses operating in California.

Some local business directories might have business listings from a certain niche or industry. For example, automobile businesses would like to list themselves with a local business directory that has listings only from automobile-related businesses.

4. Restaurant Directory

This is a kind of local business directory that offers information about food-related services. You can find new restaurants in your locality, the ones that offer your favorite food and even get the food delivered to your home.

5. Hotel Booking Business Directory

This is another type of business directory that has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. This website will include the list of hotels available with additional information like the price for the stay, location, surrounding areas and customer reviews.

The potential customers can check out the information, compare them with other hotels and make the best decision.

6. Small Business Directory

Small business directories consist of a list of small businesses either in a locality or even internationally. Small businesses are often hard to find on the web and thus these small business directories make the job easier for the users.

For example, LocalBizNetwork is a local business directory where small business owners list their businesses. Small business owners might need a boost when it comes to generating leads and gaining credibility.

LocalBizNetwork helps small business owners, both domestic and international, overcome technology barriers and be more visible to the customers.

7. Classified Ads Website

This type of website lets businesses advertise their products or services to their potential customers. People who are interested in the products/services would have to go through the ads to find the ones that suit their needs.

8. Others

These are some of the common web directories but there are more that can be added to the list. Some of them include:

Contact directory website
Job directory website
Real estate directory website
Video directory website
General directory website and more

How to Select the Best Directory to List My Business?

You must already be aware that listing your business with quality business directories increases the online presence as well as local visibility for your business. But how do you find the right directory when there are so many out there?

First, consider the type of your business and the purpose for which you are listing your business to the site. If it is to increase website traffic, then you would want to go with the popular general business directories but if you aim to increase local visibility for your business then a local business directory might be a better choice.

Domain Authority (DA): This is the number that indicates the authority of a site on the web. The higher the score, the higher it can rank on search engines. You could make a list of directories that you want to add your business to and then check the DA score to filter the best one. The highest score is 100.
Page Rank (PR): This score is used to analyze the importance of a website. The highest score is 10.
Others: There are other factors to consider like the backlink trust flow, organic traffic, frequency of the ads and more.

While choosing the directory, there are different metrics to consider but we will explain briefly two of the most important ones.

LocalBizNetwork

LocalBizNetwork LLC was formed in 1999 and over the past 20+ years, we have helped small business owners better their business and find more customers while coping with the rapidly changing technology. List your business with us by clicking here.

Originally published at https://www.localbiznetwork.com.