Anybody know good SEO success stories in the field of small business directories?

[UnyscapeInfocom]

We are helping a small business directory in their SEO. They address 20 service categories(300 subcategories) with 60000 profiles.

We are focusing on following elements:

1. Cutting the flab (they have 3.4 million pages indexed), but they get only 30000 visitors on the website. This will be done by removing long list of cities & by using "Nofollow".

2. Improve internal navigation & use Anchor texts

3. Focus SEO (Backlinks) at business category pages

4. Clean URLs, Titles

5. Implementation of Rich Snippets (Schema.org)

6. Cleaning data

If we can not take traffic volume to 300000 in a month, this project will be considered a failure. Does any directory has achieved this recently? We are in first 2 weeks of the project and It will help us our "To do" list

[UnyscapeInfocom]

Hi,

I think i wrote "one month" it is actually 6 months. We did detailed keyword research & competitor analysis and we can say with confidence that we are only getting 0.1% of traffic volume. So scope is surely there.

My question is "Are there any small but great(in SEO terms) business directories we can get inspiration from?"

[nvs.nim]

Is reaching traffic x10 a realistic KPI???

I hope you did enough keyword research to see if it's even possible reaching 300 000 visitors with the content you have right now... SEO can be optimized but if people simply aren't looking for those things traffic won't grow so spectacular I guess.