Many people believe that online business directories are just a digital version of the popular Yellow Pages. But this is not the case. Online business directories have many benefits that Yellow Pages have never had. Therefore, an online listing has its significance, and any business ignoring this significance is just putting itself at a disadvantage.
Think of an online business directory as putting up your business on a channel, which takes it to or makes it available to its prospective customers and anybody else that it might want to target.
Online business directory sites provide many perks to businesses. Some of these are discussed in this post below. But before that, we just want to mention that an online listing is among the quickest, most effective, and simplest ways of getting your products or services in front of your target audiences. The only thing is that you have to be careful enough to manage your online business listings in a way that your business only appears on those online business directory sites that are relevant to your scope and niche.
Using online business directories for building your business profiles has the potential to land you in hot water. In other words, it can get you in trouble if you blindly go on listing your business in every online business directory that you find. It is, therefore, crucial that you do your research first, and only go for those online business directories that are relevant to the industry you are operating in, and resonate with the scope of your business. Many industry-specific online business directories can be checked on their relevance to your business easily.
B2B marketing experts and successful entrepreneurs realize the importance of using online business directories for enhancing your brand’s SEO, positioning, and overall business growth. Let’s talk about the specific benefits that these online listings can give you.
8 Key Benefits of Using Online Business Directories
Here are 8 key benefits you can get by listing your business on online business directories.
1. They Boost the SEO of Your Business
When you list your business on an online business directory, it boosts your website’s SEO in several different ways. First of all, it is another way of putting up your brand or business name on the internet. These online listings usually have a lot of traffic coming to them. Therefore, a name that is listed or mentioned on them has a higher chance of getting discovered on the internet than a business name mentioned on a brand new, low-traffic website.
Another way of saying this is that when you build a new website for your business, it will take some time for it to get traction. But the online business directories already have a lot of daily traffic and site visitors. Therefore, using online business directories to put up your business name on the internet helps you in enhancing your online discoverability.
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If you have a website for your business, you can link it to your business name in the online business directory. This will get you a web link or backlink to your website, which is also good for your site’s SEO. Thus, this is the second way to use online business directories that help you boost your overall brand’s SEO.
2. They Provide Advanced Filter Options
Online business directories are very different from the Yellow Pages. The only way to find a business name in the Yellow Pages faster is to recognize that the names are listed in a specific order, which is usually the alphabetical order. Since there are too many business names starting with each alphabet, using the alphabetical order still does not help you find a particular business name instantly.
In online business directories, on the other hand, you can use the advanced filter options to search for a particular business name instantly. If your prospects are looking for your business information, and they cannot find it instantly, they might change their mind and go with a competitor of yours instead. This might cause a loss of potential sales for you. It is, therefore, important that your potential customers can find details about your business as soon as they need them. When you list your business in online business directories, you enable your target customers to find you very quickly, before they change their minds.
3. They Build Your Brand Awareness
Listing your business in online business directories puts your brand name in front of tens of thousands of eyes. You cannot get that many eyes on your brand name by only building a brand website. Your website will not be able to get as many site visitors as an online business directory in a short period, and thus your brand awareness coming purely from your website is likely to take time to build.
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But when you list your business in all the relevant online business directories, you might start building your brand awareness faster than you know. You might start getting inquiries about your products and services without even realizing where these people are hearing about your brand from.
4. They Improve the Online Visibility of Your Brand and Services
Businesses these days struggle to build online visibility for their business, as they realize the importance of it in increasing their sales. Using online business directories is a good way to do that. Along with doing social media marketing, working on your website’s SEO, using influencers to spread the word about your products, or guest posting on various blogs, using online business directories can also take you a long way in making your brand visible and searchable on the internet.
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Online business directories also sometimes provide information about your business that you might not even know your prospects are looking for. Sometimes, your prospects themselves also don’t know what exactly they are looking for until they find your business name and some details about it. It could be daunting for you to write all that information on your website from the right perspective. This is where you can give credit to the templates of online business directories, that organize information in a way that is easy for the audiences to understand and use.
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5. They Can Help You Get Faster Leads
Sometimes, the audience might be so influenced by your business when they find some information about it on an online business directory that they straight away decide to contact you to inquire more about your services. This means you can even get leads by simply listing your business on online business directories. These leads are usually valuable and relevant because they are coming from those who were specifically searching for your business name, or for the kind of services you offer. This saves your time, money, and effort in using various direct marketing methods to get leads for your business.
6. It Provides Proper Referencing to Your Business
Using online business directories provides proper referencing to your business. This in turn helps you scale the organic growth of your brand by providing an organic reach for your brand name. Most of the online business directories are considered to be credible and trustworthy platforms for people to discover different businesses. That’s why using an online listing can give you valuable, credible, and additional brand exposure.
7. They Contribute to Your Organic Marketing
All you need to do to get the benefits of using online business directories is list your business name on them. The rest of the work is done by the directories themselves, as well as by the algorithms of the search engines. This means all the benefits that you get are part of your organic marketing. You do not need to spend any money like you have to if you run paid advertisements to promote your products and services. Therefore, listing your brand on an online business directory is a good way of boosting your organic marketing.
8. They Drive Traffic to Your Corporate Website
Online business directories can help you drive traffic to your brand website. The main way this is done is by writing your website’s URL on the online listings. If after reading your business information, someone feels interested in your services, they will most likely click on the URL and visit your website to get more information. Even if they do not click on your URL, the fact that the URL is written on the online business directory gives you an added, high-quality backlink to your website, which is good for raising your site’s search rankings.
Now that you know the importance of using online business directories, don’t forget to find the most relevant ones for your business and put up your business name on them. But you also need to remember that you can only reap the benefits of enhanced SEO if you have a website that’s search ranking you’re trying to increase.
If you do not have a website for your business, you can create one easily by registering for a free account on Strikingly.
