If you have a small business especially in a small rural town in the America like Mountain Home Arkansas a population of 12,000, and you are wanting people from your local or regional area to find you, call you, and do business with you, you need to be in an online local business directory.
Here’s Why. You have to understand who is searching for you. Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers, or Millenials, and not shown are the Generation Z (also called Post Millennials), people born from 1995 to the 2020. This last generation makes up 25.9% of the Population of the United States, the largest percentage, and contribute $44 Billion to the American Economy and they’re certainly worth paying attention to.
Yellow Pages are dead. Search Engines and Local Business Directories are the new “Yellow Pages”. For a business to show up where most people are looking for them, the business owners must invest in Local SEO, and HyperLocal Branding, a way to show up everywhere locally for most people who are looking services they want to purchase.
3 Key Benefits of Online Directories
- Increases your Visibility or “Discoverability” online. Online directories are one of the first places that buyers look at when they need to find a product or service, supplier, or partner provider. By maximizing your visibility in these online directories you increase your chances to be contacted by eager buyers, ready to purchase your services or products.
- Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Directories can help provide backlinks to your site(or a citation) some being higher quality than others. This helps improve search engine visibility. Of course 70% of your visibility (in 2020) is from Google. Your directory is just another “anchor” in the local presence that shows that you are “here” in a certain region to assist search engines in determining local placement for a business’s listing. By having a directory listing in addition to a Google listing that can be saturated with tons of inaccurate information – a local directory is more likely to be up to date with the right information of local business, local labor, freelancers, and other categories you just won’t find inside Google. Bing, Yahoo, Apple, or Yelp.
- Strengthen Your Social Credit Score or Online Reputation. The internet is hard to measure in terms of the impact of the discoverability of new businesses. With all the marketing options today, sometimes it’s hard to determine where to spend your valuable advertising dollars. Having a listing with a local online directory, helps support your community (if the people who run the directory are local), and if they have created the BEST search names for your city and state, such as Mountain Home Arkansas.com this is the BEST local resource for making your business stand out locally. Because 3 of the 4 or 5 words people will be using to find you will be, your offering in the city & state, where your buyers will be looking for you.
Here are the top 10 Online Business Directories every business should be listed on.
Looking to improve the discoverability of your business? Here are 10 online directories every business should be listed on – These are even more critical when local SEO is important to your business model:
Top 7 Online Directories for Industrials
Finding a proven, trusted manufacturer or supplier can be difficult these days. For industrials, you’ll want to be sure you’re on each of these popular online directories, in addition to the general directories above:
With Hundreds of different directories that are online, across every industry knowing which directories that customers use the most is the key to being found. Your main focus should be getting in to your local directories, then on Google, you don’t have to be in every directory, but it you have a little time here and there, set a goal to do 2-3 listings each time you sit down, and over a month or two you’ll have a few hundred citations, anchoring your business in your local market. And then you can congratulate yourself as less than 1% of my clients will even take the time to do the above listings.
There is NO Free Lunch. Invest your advertising dollars for the maximum return for the LONGEST period of time in the best local online directories.
If you live in the Mountain Home Arkansas or surrounding area. You should have a listing on www.MountainHomeArkansas.com Questions? Contact John with Mountain Home Marketing at 870-495-2800. For a small setup fee we can setup your listing for you, or you can do it online yourself.
