Scroll Down For A Big List Of Places To List Your Business
Consumers may be looking in online yellow pages and local directories for businesses like yours. Even if they’re not, your being listed can be an indicator to the search engines, helping improve your local rankings at Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
What Are Local Listings?
Largely intended as online replacements for the phone books, Internet business directories are usually sorted by region, and then by type of business. They often make money in the same way as the traditional yellow pages – by selling premium placements/listings. Most, in an attempt to have a comprehensive (and therefore useful) directory, also provide free basic listings.
How To Get Listed
Because being listed in local directories can send potential customers to your site, and also count as a citation for the search engines, it’s worth putting some effort into appearing in these sources.
In addition to simply having a presence, it’s helpful to make sure your directory listings are complete – as there are often options to add photos, video, and other business details. It is also beneficial to make sure your business information is correct, as having consistent information in each location can help the search engines associate all the listings with your business.
Being listed can also help your business get reviewed in more places, and manage those reviews.
Actually listing your company is easy. You will have to fill out the information, and sometimes confirm your identity through a phone call or postcard sent to your business. To read a detailed description of this process for Google’s local directory, read my guide to Google Places.
Where To Get Listed
The only difficult part about listing your business in local directories is finding all the sites. This list includes all of the most important places to list your business, listed (very approximately) in order of importance.
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Google Places
Getting listed in Google Places will let you control your listing both on Google Maps and Google’s local search results, which appear for any locally oriented Google searches. You can also read my guide to Google Places, or learn about their advertising option, Google Boost.
Google Places List Your Business Page
Yahoo Local
Yahoo Local’s free option is the basic listing – an enhanced listing costs $9.95/month.
Yahoo Local List Your Business Page
Bing Local
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine. They have recently revamped their local listing center, offering a wealth of options, more like Google Places. They will require you to confirm your phone number or address.
Bing Local List Your Business Page
Citysearch
/ Citygrid
Citysearch is a busy site, and an important location for customer reviews. It is owned by Citygrid, which powers a variety of local sites. Citysearch no longer encourages free submissions. There is, however, a trick that sometimes works. Go to Citysearch and search for something like “asdfiasdf” in your city. If no results are found, Citysearch will give you the option to add a business – although there’s no promise as to when it will show up. Otherwise, you can go to Citygrid and sign up for paid advertising, or hope that Citysearch picks up your information from other locations.
Supermedia
Supermedia powers the Superpages site and a number of other directories.
Supermedia List Your Business Page
Yelp
Yelp is a popular place to review businesses, and an important location to be listed.
InfoUSA / Express Update USA
Infogroup has recently launched the Express Update USA site for listing your business. They provide business information to a variety of places.
Express Update USA List Your Business Page
YellowPages / YP.com 
Yellowpages.com, now branded as YP.com, is popular, no doubt partially due to it’s famous name. To get listed, you actually go to the AT&T advertising solutions site. Don’t be deterred by all the paid options, they do offer free listings.
Yellow Pages List Your Business Page
Insiderpages
Insiderpages is another busy directory/review site. They are also owned by Citygrid. The easiest way to get listed is to search for your category/location – scroll to the bottom of the listings and there should be an “add a new business” button.
Insiderpages List Your Business Page
Localeze
Localeze is quickly rising in importance, as its data will be used by both Facebook and Twitter.
Localeze List Your Business Page
Local.com
Local.com is another directory/review site.
Local.com List Your Business Page
Kudzu
Kudzu is also a locally oriented directory and review site.
Merchant Circle
Merchant Circle is a directory, and helps local companies connect with one another.
Merchant Circle List Your Business Page
Angie’s List
Angie’s List provides a subscription service for consumers, where they can write and read reviews of local businesses. It might not have the volume of some sites, but is very trusted by its subscribers.
Angie’s List List Your Business Page
Best Of The Web Local
Best Of The Web Local is the local-oriented portion of the BOTW directory. “JumpStart” is the free listing service. You might have to look closely to find it.
Best Of The Web Local List Your Business Page
Foursquare
Foursquare is a mobile-oriented site, allowing users to “check-in” at places they visit. You’ll need to search for your business, and then create an account to claim it.
Foursquare Business Owner Page
ShopCity
ShopCity is a directory of local businesses.
ShopCity List Your Business Page
Yellowbot
Yellowbot is a local search site. They have a logo saying that data is provided by Localeze, but also allow direct submissions.
Yellowbot List Your Business Page
MagicYellow
MagicYellow is another site attempting to bring the Yellow Pages online.
MagicYellow List Your Business Page
HotFrog
HotFrog is a local site for the United States, run by a company that owns a number of Australian sites.
HotFrog List Your Business Page
CitySquares
CitySquares bills itself as “Your Neighborhood, Online” – it’s another local directory.
CitySquares List Your Business Page
Matchpoint
Matchpoint is a directory with a variety of features for businesses.
Matchpoint List Your Business Page
All Done?
Hopefully this article made listing your business a bit easier. There are also a wide variety of location and industry specific directories – I’ll be writing about this more in the future, but to get started you can try searching for “your industry directory” or “your city business directory.” These more specific directories are often worthwhile. Another option is to use the Whitespark Citation finder.
I’ve also written a review of the Universal Business Listing service. I recommend manual submission to the more important sites – but you can use this service to cover 300+ additional sources.
If any of the links no longer work, or you think a site should be added, please leave a comment. I’ll continue to update this post periodically.
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Great list! I’m helping a friend who is starting a home daycare and needs to publicize her business. I was going to recommend she start with Google Places and CitySearch, but this list is a fabulous resource for her and others who are just getting started making an online presence for their small local business. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment! I thought a list of free places to list your business would be helpful… please pass it along to anyone who it would help
Great list! I’m helping a friend who is starting a home daycare and needs to publicize her business. I was going to recommend she start with Google Places and CitySearch, but this list is a fabulous resource for her and others who are just getting started making an online presence for their small local business. Thanks!
Thanks for the comment! I thought a list of free places to list your business would be helpful… please pass it along to anyone who it would help
Great list for local businesses developing their online presence. #entrepreneur Please RT | RT @smallbizshift http://bit.ly/drpUsj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Great article – RT @smallbizshift: List your business in these 15 local directories for more customers and better… http://bit.ly/drpUsj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Getting Listed in Local Business Listings: Where and How http://bit.ly/bbSPuU
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Great list for local businesses developing their online presence. #entrepreneur Please RT | RT @smallbizshift http://bit.ly/drpUsj
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @smallbizshift: To do this weekend: Get your business listed everywhere online – http://bit.ly/drpUsj and start getting reviews – http://bit.ly/dj7vK6
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Once your SEO is in place, list your business online & don’t do all at once, spread it out over time. major listings: http://dld.bz/m5np
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
RT @smallbizshift: To do this weekend: Get your business listed everywhere online – http://bit.ly/drpUsj and start getting reviews – http://bit.ly/dj7vK6
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Thanks for the great list. it seems Zidster is just for NJ businesses, however.
You’re welcome, and thanks for the comment. I’ve experienced some troubles with Zidster and think you’re right – I can’t find anywhere that it says “NJ only”, but the site only seems to work for New Jersey.
I’ll be updating this list soon, some of the sites have changed there signup page locations as well. It looks like Zidster will have to go.
This is super helpful. Thanks a lot!
You’re welcome, I’m glad you found the site!
I would prefer that this site’s links to getting listed opened in new tabs instead of clicking through on the same window.
That’s not a bad idea Zac – this article’s going to be updated in the near future, with some sites getting added and removed. I’ll think about changing that then. You can always hold down the control key when clicking the link as well.
Very helpful list, Chris. Did it get updated since June 2011?
Great list. Very help for SMB owners.
Thanks! That’s the goal.
Awesome list! I recently spoke with innovative startup Locationary.com – an open global business listing that combines crowdsourcing and gaming to maintain it’s data. Another option is Open Directory Project dmoz.org based on the Wikipedia model. (FYI, I’m not affiliated with either.)
Glad you liked the list – Locationary looks like an interesting site.
Yes, Locationary is a pretty new way of having DATA Up to date.
Users gets rewards for adding or verifying datas.
Have a look !
http://bit.ly/ipGMRJ
Good list! I would add PinBud, a new directory for service businesses (contractors, professionals…). Not just local search and user reviews, but also direct sales leads from potential customers as PinBud enables them to send one request for service to multiple companies listed in the directory.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll take a look at it.
Chris, I like to see information that encourages businesses to get listed online. There seem to be many that do not yet see the importance of online listings.
I created an online directory http://www.qurkl.com you may want to check out and add to your list. Listings are always free but as traffic increases we plan to add the option for businesses to create an ad for a month at a time for special events, coupons, or just because. These listings will be on the right and so not change the order of the listings on the left. Businesses that edit most frequently will rank higher so it rewards them for making sure their listings is updated.
Thanks for the comment Beuna. This list really just covers the most popular sites – if yours does really well, or if I ever create a larger list, I’ll be sure to take a look at it.
Thank you so much Chris i been driving my self crazy with all these company trying to get me to pay them 100 a month to list my business on line. Well that didnt work out to well because they spelt my company name wrong and put it under catering instead of massage. lol
Thanks to you I was able to fix everything on my own. And save some money because of you. I am a first time business owner so this helped me out alot.
Thanks a million!!!
No problem, I’m glad you found it useful!
Getting listed is not enough, is even useless if you don’t go further, if you type “restaurant in paris” in google maps, it will come up with nearly 27000 results. I don’t believe more than 30, maybe 100 (for curious internet users) of these listings would be viewed.
Why?
Because they are listed, but not well ranked!
To get ranked in google places (and all other local directories) you need two major things:
- Have a detailed description about your listing (website, images…)
- Have many positive reviews, more, the more you get the more you raise in position.
To have many positive reviews you have to encourage your customers to go online and leave rating on your business listing.
The other alternative is to just go to http://www.placesmaster.com and buy as many reviews as you want.
Good luck!
Thank you Chris! I looked everywhere for this, I love the fact that you provide the link directly to the sign up form. I have my data entry headed to this article to start hammering them out.
Nice Post! I have found it helpful to add your business listing to Acxiom as well as Localeze and Infogroup. I created a step by step post to help business or SEO submit their clients business. I hope this is helpful for all of you. http://www.milkmen.com/blog/2011/11/how-to-guide-for-acxiom/
Thanks for putting this list together.
I spent a couple of hours listing my business on each site.
Overall very simple although a couple of the sites were a little confusing.
Only bad thing is i got two telemarketing calls from “supposed” companies that were not part of this list trying to sell me services to list my business on other sites for a premium. They both has strong African accents and were extremely agressive and pushy. I had to hang up on both of them
Chris!
I’ll appreciate you for this effort but I wanna a little more. You put all list you can that’s good. But when we talk about local listing it depends on the domain too. Like you have listed “hotfrog.com” and I believe it’s very good website, crawling ratio is very quick but hotfrog also got domain at different country levels like hotfrog.co.uk, hotfrog.ca.
So my question is the sites you listed all, have they also their other country level domains? Or can you help us with those. That would be a great.
Thanks
Alexis Bob
I tried your trick on city search and it didn’t work. Perhaps I was searching the wrong place? Main page search box.
Nice list. Business listing is very essential if you want to achieve a target audience from a particular area.
I really impressed after read this because of some quality work and informative thoughts . I just wanna say thanks for the writer and wish you all the best for coming!
http://www.cosmopolitanmechanical.com
This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I have read.
Thanks for the great list!! Very helpful!
This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I have read.
Good list Thank You. It sure does takes awhile for directories to list my site. I Guess i should have a master list of who I added too so I don’t waste to much time relisting the same info. These blogs really help us internet marketing newbies.
Justdial is one of the websites in India where people search for local businesses. Hence this is a website which Indian companies should not miss out.
This is very helpful to every one. Thanks!
This is very helpful. Thank you..
Thank you for this very helpful list. In case you are still interested in updating this list, the link for citysearch no longer works.
Thanks for giving idea to listing new local Business in Different Location. I mostly use a google map listing & Yahoo Local Business.
Awesome Job on this list!
I really needed this, and have registered my business, Glam Girl Naturals on all sites.
This is very useful list for me Thank!s
Thanks so much for sharing……
Thank!s
Thank!s for Share list
Hi! You can add your business to http://www.youbusiness.us . It is a professional business network. You will be able to add jobs and announcements.
Hi,
Great list, very useful thankyou. Don’t know if you have heard about it, but http://www.freebd.co.uk is another good uk directory.
regards
carl
Very helpful list.but i think there are some more other sites which needs to be listed on list..but really good local listing sites list.thanks
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Thanks!! for this list.
hello everyone,
I want to say that this list help me lot and i think many more sites left also.
Business/Local Listing is the main step to get your business or website to dominate the major search engines. This a great list but some of the sites are missing you can check here for more sites http://seokurukshetra.blogspot.in/p/local-listing-sites.html
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