Australian Business Directories Worth Your Time

Read the Effort and Address columns together, because on this page they mean something specific.

Most of these directories ask for an ABN. It is a public number, free to look up, and once you have it to hand it takes seconds to enter, so a medium effort rating usually means an ABN check rather than a hard form. That same check is why this category is in better shape in Australia than almost anywhere else, because it keeps bulk spam out.

The trade platforms are the exception, and their high effort rating is accurate. Expect to supply licence details and insurance, and in some trades a background check.

Everything here is free. The general directories will contact you about advertising, but the free listing does not depend on buying any.

Focus on the trade platforms first and treat the general directories as secondary.

Australian customers go straight to hipages and ServiceSeeking when they need someone, so these are not just sites that search engines read. Your profile there is a way to win customers first and a citation second, which is the reverse of almost everything else on this site.

Both ask for an ABN, a trade licence and insurance. Gather those once and apply to both in the same sitting, because the second application takes a fraction of the time.

Think carefully about the lead products. The free profile is the citation and it works on its own. Buying leads on top is a business decision with its own numbers, and nothing on this page is advice about it.

Your category has its own directories, and for the searches your customers actually run, they do better than the general ones.

AGFG for food and hospitality, plus the tourism and event listings further down the table, reach people who are looking for exactly what you sell. A general business directory does not.

Do the three at the top of this page as your foundation, then your category entries, then stop. Reviews matter more in hospitality than in any other category, so a claimed and complete ProductReview profile is worth more to you than five extra directory listings.

The regional entries on this page are worth more to you than the national ones, even though they look weaker to everyone else.

The state and city directories show small traffic figures that look unimpressive in the table. That traffic is local by definition, though, and someone searching a regional directory is much closer to becoming a customer than someone searching nationally.

Do the national set first, because it is your foundation. Then add only the regional entries that cover your area and leave the rest. A Perth directory does nothing for a business in Newcastle.

The general directories publish quickly, the trade platforms take days, and Yellow Pages will follow up with a sales pitch you can ignore without losing your listing.

With your ABN ready, most of these take a few minutes each. That is the practical upside of the check: it is a small hurdle for you and a big one for anyone submitting in bulk, which is why these pages are less crowded than their overseas equivalents.

The real payoff is consistency, not a ranking jump. When your name, address, phone number and ABN match across the Australian records other systems read from, search engines have one less reason to be unsure about you. On its own, though, that will not win you a competitive local search.

The order on this page is our judgement against the factors above, applied to entries that have each been checked. We have not yet run our own submissions through this set and timed them. That test is planned, and when it runs this section will be replaced with the numbers.

Skip this page if you have no ABN. Most entries here ask for one and several verify it, so there is no getting around it.

Skip it too if you have no Australian address a customer could visit. Local search is not your channel, and the general web directories page will suit you better.

Leave the trade platforms alone unless you hold the licence they ask for. They check, and an application without one gets rejected.

And once the top of the table is done and consistent, you can skip the bottom third. It works the same way in every country: your first five listings do most of the work, and the twenty fifth does almost none.