[MASTER CLASS] How to Create the Best Local Directory Website

Here at Brilliant Directories, we like to guide our users down the path to success. To this end, we put together this short webinar segment on five simple ways to ensure your local business directory website appears established and professional. As we all know:

A good business doesn’t want to be associated with a bad directory…

So how do you go about ensuring your business directory is the best of them all? If you follow our advice, you should be finding yourself on the path to success!

We broke down the best methods for ensuring your business directory does well on a local scale. If you want to be successful, then read on for some industry-leading insights.

1. Exciting Articles – A Simple Way to Provide Top Content

Setting up your local directory website for success should start with writing useful, exciting and engaging articles. Although this should be a matter of common sense to most; there are several ways you can make sure you always have the best content – that works for you, as well as your general users and members.

What we need to consider is that interesting articles don’t just push up your rank in Google search results – they can also be harnessed to garner you more business. How? By using a relatively simple process that establishes rankings within your categories. To exemplify this, let’s look at the following scenario…

You may have an online city directory with a category listing local restaurants. Within that category, you may then be able to establish a hierarchy by use of written content. Perhaps you have twenty restaurants listed in your directory; so you write an article featuring the best five restaurants in town. While this might breed a little competition between the restaurants, it will also give you a unique selling point for next year.

Then you can approach the other fifteen restaurants and tell them they could be on next year’s top restaurant list if they pay a little extra or promote your online directory for you. You can start to see how these new articles can become profitable. The businesses featured in your article can use this as advertising, and you can earn extra cash in the meantime – that’s what we call that a win-win.

If you don’t have time to write articles for yourself, you can harness a professional content writer to do it for you. Try Fiverr, Upwork or TextBroker to hire these writers and free up your own time for other tasks such as marketing, reaching out to potential new members, etc.

2. Harnessing Popular Deals and Events

To regularly get the most out of deals and events, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your website’s visitors and general users. What information are they most likely to be searching for on your both on Google and on your website? What is it you offer that other sites don’t have? When you start considering things from your user’s perspective, you will soon find you can spot popular deals and events at a glance.

The idea here is that you can harness the traffic of popular events and deals. If it is a happy hour every week at a local sports bar, then you only need to enter that information once into your local directory to gain the recurring benefits of the traffic that can bring.

3. Use Simple Categories to Navigate

Establishing member categories can trip up even the most experienced directory website owner. Naturally you would think that having more categories would be better for business, but this is not necessarily the case. Having too many categories in your online directory can confuse users are lead them away from your site. A confusing user experience is the fastest way to deter visitors from your website.

How so? Well, too many categories give the user so much choice that it lowers the chances of finding what they seek. If you have fifteen different sub-categories under your lawyer main category, then you increase the risk that your users either pick the wrong type of lawyer for what they need, or they end up searching in a sub-category that has little to no members in which case they receive no valuable information from your website; this leads to loss of users and traffic – so be keen!

4. High-Quality Images are Vital

You should never underestimate the impact of using high-quality pictures. The images on your website need to be clear, bright, attention-grabbing and fit to purpose. If they are not then delete them – and be ruthless! There are four rules to ensuring images are good enough to represent your directory website in the most professional light. These are as follows:

• Do not use blurry or grainy images, these will turn away potential users and give a bad impression.
• Do not use images with white backgrounds as these tend to appear washed out and can drastically affect the amount of time a member wants to spend on a site.
• Make sure you use images have the proper dimensions – warping or stretching never looks good.
• Do not stretch images to fit anywhere on your site. These look low quality and turn off potential businesses and users. Instead, find images that are already the correct size needed or that can be cropped down.

5. Elevate the Value of Your Directory

Elevating the value of your directory includes everything from introducing tiered membership to using articles to prompt some friendly competition between local businesses. Raising the value of your local directory website will make you more money and bring in new users, so do it often and well for success!

Offering incentives to businesses is one of the best ways to elevate the value of your site. Giving them the chance to use your website’s name to gain themselves notoriety can be mutually beneficial and lead to more business in the future.

Engaging in regular promotions and deals will also increase the value of your site by way of boosting traffic – and the more traffic you have, the more your members will fight (or pay) for that coveted top spot!

Guiding Local Business Directories in the Right Direction!

We here at Brilliant Directories specialize in guiding local business directories towards success – so if you are an online directory owner, then you need us! Bookmark our page or visit our blog for regular hints and tips straight from the industry experts.

With Brilliant Directories, success is well within your grasp!

This is a segment from Webinar Wednesday 40, recorded live on May 16, 2018.