UK Business Directories Worth Your Time

Start with the Effort column on this page, because it means something different here than on our other pages.

Four entries are vetted trade platforms, and their effort rating is high for good reason. You will be asked for public liability insurance and trade qualifications, and some also ask for references or a background check. It is a small application rather than a quick form, and that is also why those four are the most valuable entries on the page.

Several of the B2B directories check your company number against the public register. If you trade as a sole trader rather than a limited company, expect those to turn you down. That reflects how the directory works and says nothing about your business.

Everything here is free. Yell in particular will follow up hard about advertising, and the free listing does not depend on it.

The vetted platforms matter most for you, and everything else on this page comes second.

UK customers go to Checkatrade, TrustATrader and Rated People to find someone when they need a job done, so these sites bring you enquiries as well as feeding search engines. Getting through the vetting takes days and paperwork, and that friction is what makes a profile there worth having when the free directories will list anyone who can type.

Put your public liability certificate, your trade qualifications and your company details in one folder, then apply to two of the platforms in the same afternoon. The second application takes a fraction of the time the first one did.

Then add Yell and FreeIndex for general coverage and stop. Three vetted profiles and two general listings will do more for a trade business than thirty unvetted ones.

Skip the trade platforms completely. They will not accept you, so the effort would be wasted.

Your set is the general directories plus the B2B ones: Yell, 192.com, FreeIndex and Thomson Local, then Approved Business, Business Magnet and Find The Needle if you sell to other businesses rather than to the public.

The company number check on several of the B2B entries works in your favour. It keeps the noise out, so the pages your entry sits on are less crowded and more credible than the open directories.

Allow an afternoon in total, and expect the B2B directories to want a longer description than the consumer ones do.

The regional and county directories on this page are worth more to you than to anyone else, and worth very little to a business outside their area.

CityVisitor, City Local and the county specific entries get modest traffic, which looks unimpressive in the table. But that traffic is local by definition, and someone searching a regional directory is closer to being your customer than someone browsing a large national one.

Do the national set first, because it is your foundation. Then add the two or three regional entries that actually cover your area and ignore the rest of the long tail. A directory for a county you do not work in does nothing for you.

On the vetted platforms, expect the process to take days, and expect requests for documents you may not have to hand. That is the vetting doing its job. Once you are through, your profile appears in searches customers actually run, and you will get lead offers to decide on separately.

On the general directories, expect fast publication and a modest effect. Yell will call you about advertising. The smaller directories publish instantly, which tells you nobody read your submission, so give them less weight.

Across the whole page, expect consistency more than rankings. When your name, address and phone number agree across the platforms other systems read from, search engines have one less reason to doubt you. It will not make you the top answer for a competitive search in your town.

The order here 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. That test is planned, and when it runs this section will show the counts: how many accepted us, how long each took, and how many were still correct ninety days later.

Skip this page if you have no UK address. Nearly every entry expects one and several verify it, so submitting without one wastes your afternoon and clutters the directory.

Skip the trade platforms unless you work in a trade. They reject office based businesses, so going through the vetting would be time wasted.

Skip the B2B directories if you sell to consumers. The company number requirement is a hurdle with nothing on the other side for you, and the people reading those pages are not your customers.

And once you have done the top of this table, skip the bottom third. UK directories follow the same curve as everywhere else: the first five listings do most of the work, and the twenty fifth does almost nothing.