Businesses enlist their info on a directory listings for a single purpose – to grow. Be that with quality leads, phone calls, direct booking or just website traffic, they want returns for their investment. Even if the directory offers absolutely free listing and booking features, you took the time and effort to put your nitty-gritty details on the website – that’s an investment!

So how can you get the best return on your investment? Simply by what you need – website traffic, leads, store visits, phone calls, online bookings etc. Sounds very simple but not as easy as we think.

Bringing quality traffic to your listing requires having high quality listings in the first place. You need to make sure that your listings are evaluated properly to ensure that quality.  Once you do that, you can ensure that your listings will attract high quality traffic resulting in increased conversion.

Don’t worry, we are not letting you struggle on the evaluation and listing quality improvement. We will help you evaluate the quality of your directory listings and point out what matters most when it comes to optimizing the listing for improvement. The following article is dedicated to make you understand what matters most when it comes to listing quality improvement.

What are Directory Listings?

A directory listing is an online catalog where you can find organized information about businesses and their services. It is like a digital phone book, but instead of just phone numbers and people, it stores various data like websites, email and physical location and other relevant information.

Business Directories are very useful for boosting SEO, improving online visibility, generating leads, or building credibility. High-quality listing directories are crucial to the success of business on the digital landscape. On the other hand, low-quality listings can do harm to your business.

There are various factors that make your listing effective or ineffective and we will explore them. Because, evaluating the effectiveness and credibility of directory listings are necessary to make sure that they positively contribute to improving your website’s ranking.

Elements To Evaluate Directory Listings Quality

There are a number of elements that define the utmost quality of business directory listings. Businesses must consider them before enlisting their business on any directory. Similarly there are elements that need to be avoided if you want to ensure the quality of your listings.

Below are a few elements that can help you evaluate listing quality in business directories.

Industry Relevance

The first thing to consider for directory listing is niche relevancy. Industry-specific directories provide higher value than the general ones. Selecting directories that align with your industry ensures that your services are reaching the right audience.

For example, if you are running a cosmetic business, submitting your website to a directory dedicated to cosmetic products is much more effective. Another example can be, if you are a dental care center, you look for dental care and dentist associated listings rather than common medical center, healthcare or local business directories.

Having said that, I am not suggesting that you need to pick only dental care related listings but your focus should be there. You can also have listings elsewhere but make sure that you are spending more time polishing the relevant ones.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) score is an important metric to judge any website’s credibility and authority. It is also a crucial element in evaluating the quality of a directory listing. This metric helps determine a website’s ranking potential in the search results.

Websites with higher domain authority are more trusted by the search engine. They indicate credibility and relevance to the search engines resulting in taking the higher positions. You ought to look out for directories with high DA for listing quality improvement and attracting high value traffic on your page.

DA scores range from 0 to 100; the higher the score, the greater the ranking potential. Directories with high DA are likely to have more traffic because of their trustworthiness. So, utilizing them as your directory listing can go a long way toward improving your ranking.

To determine the DA score of a directory website, use a reliable DA checker like Prepostseo. It helps you evaluate the domain authority score of any directory website for free. You can also analyze the Page Authority (PA) score of your listing pages and spam score of the entire site using these tools.

Backlink Profile Assessment

Backlinks are crucial for SEO. They are the indicators that help search engines check the authority and relevance of your website. When selecting an online directory, analyze its backlinks.

Backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites show credibility and authenticity. With them, you can significantly boost your website’s search engine ranking. You can analyze any directory’s backlink profile and determine its credibility and authority with tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush.

Just to be clear, a proper and authoritative backlink profile will have diverse anchor text, URLs, brand terms, and relevant phrases. If there is an overabundance of exact-match anchor text, it may indicate artificial link building.

Listing Fields and Reviews

Another element to evaluate in a listing to enhance quality is the listing fields and reviews sections. The more industry-specific fields the directory displays, the more likely it is to drag visitors here. For example, your hairstyle salon listing should contain specifically opening and closing hours, standard rate and gender preference (men only/women only etc) clearly.

Reviews are the best fields on any directory that displays the evaluation score of a listing. It builds trust or breaks them. Make sure to have the reviews and rating sections enabled on your listing and the platform displays them with clarity.

Do not list your businesses on platforms that hide reviews or display fewer ones. Do not pick a listing with incomplete rating (i.e. no fractional rating display). It is very important that the fields and review sections are well optimized as well as configured to get the traction you expect.

Media and Filters

While picking a directory that has various filters to enhance search results of the visitors, you also need to make sure that your listings contain realistic media items (photos, videos). And they must display properly on the listing.

Many websites use image compressor tools that automatically compress images to a minimal size. It is good for site speed but if the images are compressed to a point where they no longer look transparent or fails to communicate the value you originally provide, you are in big trouble.

The suggestion is to pick the platform that has CDN enabled, does not ruin the quality of your media files and shows your business based on various filters. To appear on filters, you also need to choose the right category, pick all the relevant tags and collect reviews and ratings to have a higher position. This way you can improve listing quality which results in increased traffic.

Conclusion

A researched and well-informed approach is necessary when it comes to evaluating your online directory listings. By focusing on the elements we discussed above, you will witness growth that can elevate your website’s ranking and ensure that your services reach the right targeted audience.  So, stop wasting time and start evaluating the listings to improve the visibility of your website.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)