Local Citation Directories That Still Matter

Look at the Address and Country columns first. Every entry here expects a business with a physical location, so if you run a website with no premises, the general web directories page will suit you better.

Country works as a filter here rather than a heading, because many of these platforms run one site across several countries and listing them four times would only pad the table. The United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia each get a page of their own, with the local incumbents and local requirements that change the answer there.

Link type is included for completeness, but give it less weight here than anywhere else on the site. On these sites you are after the record, and a link is a bonus.

Set up the three platform profiles at the top of this page, then wait a fortnight before you add anything else.

The order matters. Those three are the records other systems read from, so if they are right first, everything you add later agrees with them. Add twenty listings before that foundation is in place and you can end up with twenty versions of your own address.

After the fortnight, open your country page and work down from the top until the effort column stops looking worth it. For most single location businesses that means somewhere between eight and fifteen listings in total, and the fifteenth is worth far less than the first.

If you are a plumber, an electrician, a builder or similar, the maths changes, and SEO is the smaller part of the case.

The trade platforms in the UK and Australia, and their equivalents in the US and Canada, are places customers search directly, so they bring you work as well as feeding search engines. They also vet their members. Expect to provide insurance documents, trade qualifications and in some cases a background check before a profile goes live, which takes days rather than minutes.

That vetting is what makes them worth it. A listing on a platform that checks its members means something to a customer, and it keeps its value long after the free directories have filled up with spam.

Your problem is the listings that are wrong, more than the ones that are missing, and adding new records on top of stale ones only makes it worse.

Search your old phone number in quotation marks, then your old address. Every result is still telling search engines something untrue about you, and old records tend to outrank new ones because they have been around longer.

Fix what you can edit, claim what you cannot, and only then start adding. It is slow, unglamorous work, and it will do more for you than any new submission on this page.

Expect gradual change, over weeks rather than days.

Citations take away reasons for search engines to be unsure about you. You will notice it as things slowly stop being wrong, more than as a jump in rankings. The businesses that see the biggest change are the ones that started with contradictory records, and that describes most businesses that have been trading for a few years.

On their own, citations will not make you the top answer for a competitive local search. Your categories, your reviews, how close you are to the searcher and the quality of your website all matter more. Think of citations as the floor you build on.

The order on this page is our judgement against the factors above, applied to entries that have each been checked. We have not yet sent a site through all of these and timed it. That test is planned, and when it runs this section will show real counts: how many listings were approved, how long each took, and how many were still live ninety days later.

Skip this page if you have no physical address a customer could visit, or no local phone number. Almost every entry here expects both, and a submission without them is either rejected at validation or filed where nobody looks. The general web directories page is built for websites without premises.

Skip it too if you run a national ecommerce business with no premises open to the public. Your customers are not searching by location, so map results are not a channel you compete in.

If you have already done the platform profiles and your details are consistent, skip the long tail. The twentieth citation is worth a fraction of the third, and that hour is better spent on reviews or on your own site.

Finally, skip anything on this page that asks for money before it will list you at all. Paid extras on top of a free listing are normal and sometimes reasonable. A directory that will only record your business if you pay is selling you a page nobody reads.