Seven Things to Check Before You Pay Any Directory a Penny

Every few weeks a small business in Leicester gets an email from a directory. The pitch is familiar. Your listing is unclaimed, hundreds of people searched for you this month, and for a modest fee the listing can be upgraded. Some are worth the money. Most are not, and you cannot tell which from the email.

What follows is the set of checks worth running before paying anyone, and that includes us. None of them needs a paid tool. Each takes a few minutes with a browser, and together they tell you whether a directory is a place people go, or a place that exists to be sold to the businesses in it.

1. Does your listing have a URL of its own?

Open any listing on the directory and look at the address bar. You want a plain address, something like directory.co.uk/leicester/plumbers/your-business-name. What you do not want is a listing that opens in a pop-up over the results grid while the address stays the same, or one that only exists at an address with a long string of parameters after a question mark. If the page has no address of its own, Google has nothing to index, and your listing is invisible to anyone who is not already on the site.

Then check whether Google has actually indexed it. Type site: followed by the listing address into Google. If it comes back, the page is in the index. Google notes that the site: operator does not necessarily return every URL that is indexed, so a blank result is not proof for a big site. For a single listing page it is a fair first test, and if the directory’s whole Leicester section returns nothing, that tells you plenty.

2. Is the link to your website a real one?

A listing usually includes a link to your website. Whether that link counts for anything depends on a small attribute in the HTML. Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and look at the tag. If it carries rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored", the directory is telling Google not to associate itself with your site. Google’s documentation on link attributes says links marked this way will generally not be followed, and that sponsored is the value for advertisements and paid placements.

Neither is a scandal. Plenty of respectable sites mark every outbound link nofollow as a blanket policy. If the sales page talks about boosting your SEO and the link it gives you is nofollow, the two claims do not fit together, and you should ask which one is true. Also watch for links that go to the directory’s own address first and bounce you on to your site. A redirect through a tracking URL is another way to hand you a link that passes nothing. What a followed link does and does not do for you is covered in backlinks explained.

There is an awkward truth here. Google’s spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and say such links are only acceptable when qualified with nofollow or sponsored. The same page names low-quality directory links as an example. A paid listing on a real directory that happens to carry a followed link sits in a grey area. The directory would say you are paying for the listing, not the link, and Google has never drawn the line precisely. The honest position is that a followed link from a paid directory is a small bonus, not the reason to pay. If the link is the only thing on offer, that is exactly the arrangement the policy describes.

3. Does the page carry structured data?

Structured data is a block of code that tells Google what a page is about in a form it does not have to guess at. For a directory listing the relevant type is LocalBusiness. Google’s LocalBusiness documentation says name and address are required, and recommends telephone, opening hours, coordinates and the business URL. The format in Google’s examples is JSON-LD, a short script block in the page.

You do not need to read the code. Paste the listing address into Google’s Rich Results Test. If it detects LocalBusiness, the directory has done the work. If it finds nothing, the page is plain text as far as Google is concerned. This check is mostly about whether the directory takes the technical side seriously. The ones that skip structured data tend to skip other things too.

4. Does it run its own reviews, or send people to Google?

Some directories have their own star ratings and a leave-a-review button. It looks like a feature. Think about what it does. Every happy customer who leaves a review on the directory is a customer who did not leave one on Google. Google’s own guide to local ranking says prominence is based partly on how many reviews you have, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. A directory that collects your reviews is diverting the signal that matters most for the map into a place where it does nothing for you.

The better pattern is a directory that shows your Google rating and links to your Google profile, or simply asks nothing of your customers. If a directory pushes hard for reviews on its own platform, ask why. Sometimes the answer is that the reviews are the product. They keep people on the directory’s pages and away from yours.

5. Is the listing current, or a 2019 snapshot?

Open five listings in your category. Check the hours against each business’s own website. Ring a number or two. If half of them are for businesses that have moved, closed or changed number, the directory is not maintained, and your accurate listing will sit among stale ones. BrightLocal’s introduction to citations makes the case that listings earn trust when exactly the same information appears across a number of trusted websites, and cites a survey in which 63% of consumers said finding incorrect information would stop them choosing a business. A directory full of wrong numbers is trusted by nobody, Google included.

• •Can you edit your own listing, and how quickly do edits go live?
• •Does the directory ever ask you to confirm your details, or does it wait for you to notice?
• •Are closed businesses removed, or still ranking above open ones?

The ones worth paying for check. What a well-kept listing looks like in practice is in what a finished listing looks like.

6. Does the directory itself show up anywhere?

The simplest test. Search Google for your category and your town: electrician Leicester, dog groomer Oadby, accountant Wigston. Scroll the first two pages. Is the directory there? Now try three or four other categories. A directory that ranks for nothing in its own city is not sending anyone to its listings, whatever the traffic figures in the sales email say.

Traffic claims deserve the same scepticism. Two million visits a year across the whole UK might be a few dozen a month in Leicester, spread over a thousand listings. Ask for figures specific to your town and category. If they cannot give them, assume the number is small. The distinction to hold in your head is between a directory that is a real destination, where locals go to find a plumber the way they would ask a neighbour, and one that exists to sell listings to the businesses in it. The first kind ranks. The second kind sends emails.

On this check we are only part-way there. Mavlo is new and Leicester-only, and we rank for some categories and not yet for others. Run the search for yours and hold us to the same standard as anyone else.

7. Is the price fair for what is delivered?

Once the first six checks are done, the price question mostly answers itself. A directory that passes all six is providing an indexed, structured, current listing with a followed link on a site locals use. One that fails four is selling you a page nobody will see, and no price is fair for that.

There is no published going rate for a local listing, and the sales emails know it, so compare against something with a known price. Membership of your local chamber of commerce includes a directory listing alongside events and introductions. If a bare directory listing costs more than a chamber membership, someone needs to explain what else you are getting. The same test applies to featured placement: a premium spot on a page that does not rank is a premium spot in an empty room.

Ask for the price per year, in writing, with what it includes and whether it renews automatically. Then ask what happens to the listing if you stop paying. A directory that deletes your free listing the moment the paid one lapses is telling you what it thinks the free listing is for.

What this adds up to

None of the seven checks asks the directory anything. Each one is something you can see for yourself, which is the point. A directory that is useful to the people of Leicester passes these without knowing it is being tested. The ones that fail tend to have very good emails.

Run the checks on us

Search your category in Leicester, open a Mavlo listing, and put it through all seven. The free tier passes them too.

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