Is a listing in this directory really worth $365/year??
-
Recently i noticed one of our competitors is getting a citation out of a directory called Refer Links. I contacted them to find out their pricing, and to be listed in that directory it is $365/year.
I noticed that all the links to the websites are cloaked with php redirects and rel=nofollows' so i doubt it would do much for our page rank, so strictly from a citation standpoint, is this worth it?
Here is our competitors listing:
http://www.referlinks.com/listing/all-canadian-self-storage-inc--mobile-self-storage.html
-
A quote I enjoy...."Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true".
You earned the #1 spot which is great. It sounds like your plan is to wait for someone else to step up and take your spot and then react. I prefer to be proactive but the choice is yours.
-
Thanks Ryan. I have been meaning to make those changes to the onpage stuff. I did fix the title tags as you sugested. And from some other link building we did recently we are now ranking #1 for that local SERP, so i am actually somewhat hesitant to change anything on that page right now.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=storage+mississauga&pws=0&hl=en&num=10
-
I would listen to Ryan's advice.
The sites foundation (coding, on-page SEO) take priority over link building or any other different web marketing strategies. Once the foundation is strong, other strategies become much easier to execute - in your case, if you get the off-page right, you will see much more returns from every link you will be earning.
-
OFF-TOPIC reply: @Storwell
I am offering this "free advice" in an effort to be helpful so I hope you take this the right way.
You are spending a lot of time focusing on your competitors when you have plenty of opportunities for basic on-page SEO within your own site. I know you have been around SEOmoz for a bit and have already read the Beginner's Guide to SEO, but read it again!
Work on 1 chapter per day or whenever you have time and apply the principles directly to your site. I would not worry about competitors until your on-site SEO was solid. Last week I shared an issue with your alt text. You have a lot of fantastic images but their tags are all identical: "self storage mississauga tour". You use that tag a dozen times.
Make one improvement to your site today. Go through the entire site, find every image and update their alt tags to an accurate description which also includes helpful key words. Examples:
Self Storage Security
Storage Garage
Self Storage Area
Think of any terms that users may use to search for your services but also apply to the image.
Climbing to the top is much faster if you can pull yourself up rather then pulling your competitors down.
-
I wouldn't pay that amount even if it was a permanent listing. Certain Nofollows do pass juice and they are not completely useless but this one is not worth the investment considering the price. Even if it was dofollow, just look at the worth of the page not just the root domain (which is not that great either).
-
Everyone is going to place different value in different parts of their marketing strategy, so only you can ultimately decide if its worth it or not.
That being said I would not pursue this service. They have a decent traffic ranking in Canada, but not enough to warrant what they're asking for, in my view. And with the nofollow and php redirects, you're getting no SEO benefit from the service, only whatever traffic they send directly from their site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google instantly suspends Google+ local listing of brand new company
I just tried to create a Google+ listing for a client. It's a brand new company. As soon as I submit the listing, I get an error message: "Google has suspended your page due to quality issues." There is no content on the listing, no website, etc. Just their NAP. All I can guess is their business address or phone number is on a blacklist due to some previous tenant/owner. Does Google keep a blacklist of addresses and/or phone numbers? Any other ideas?
Image & Video Optimization | | AdamThompson0 -
How do you manage phone verification when claiming listings on behalf of clients (local and remote)?
As the top competitive difference maker, Quality/Authority of Structured Citations is pretty important. That being said, I spend a good deal of time manually running around to different citation websites and jumping through their hoops to get my clients' websites listed properly. I've been using getlisted.org to check my sites, and a lot of the citation sources out there require phone verification. Now I was wondering how you professionally manage the phone verification step for your own clients. I've found it a bit difficult getting my clients to reliably get the PIN numbers for me. I've even had problems with clients checking the mail for the post cards that get sent! At this point in time, I try to schedule a time (not during business hours preferably) to go into the location and answer the phone to get everything verified in one shot. For remote clients however, I just have to hope that they are on board with answering their phones and getting the PIN numbers back to me. Lastly, how do you manage to reduce the amount of sales calls that your client receives from these listing sites? I currently register accounts under a separate email address, for example, webmaster@domain.com. This cuts down on the email marketing spam, and it obviously helps me stay in control of the listings. How do you handle the phone calls though? Especially from some of the more aggressive companies like Yelp? Personally I've just been 'briefing' my clients on how to respond to these sales calls, and I've educated them on the importance of these listings so they aren't too annoyed with the assault of sales reps calling their business constantly. Are there any magic words that my clients can use with these sales reps to make them stop calling? Sorry for the long post, if you've made it this far thank you for reading!
Image & Video Optimization | | IronSummitMedia0 -
Multiple Vacation Rentals Local Listings
A client of ours is a vacation rental company with over 50 properties (each property is only marketed through this company). They recently asked if they could add each rental property as a listing in Google Places, Bing, Yahoo, etc. I've been doing research on whether this is advisable or can hurt them in some way. If anyone has had a similar situation, any advice would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Image & Video Optimization | | naymark.biz0 -
Will it help/hinder our local seo by including our local adress on multiple pages?
We have a large website that targets the whole UK. It has landing pages for every town in the UK. For the towns that this particular business has a bricks and mortar hq, we have set up a local/places page. We then added the corresponding places adress to the appropriate town page on the website. This is just a handful compared to the 3,000,000 towns our site aims to rank for. Question: Would it help or hinder our SEO efforts to add the local addresses to other town pages in close proximity to the original? For instance say we have a places address for croydon in London. Would it hurt to add this address to pages that target towns near croydon, such as Mitcham. All opinions greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Image & Video Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
G+ Profile and Pages won't let me list categories
Hi Mozzers, I'm working on a client's G+ profile and sub-pages and the competition all have one simple category - 'House Clearance'. When you start typing there is a drop down and this category isn't present for us? Nowhere near.This is what the client does and I can't work out howe to get it in the page? Anyone else had this problem. Thanks Gareth
Image & Video Optimization | | Bush_JSM0 -
How many local citations directory listings are recommended to obtain a month?
Hi, I am interested to hear what others recommend for the amount of local references & citations to obtain a month. For example, have you found it is better to get listed in SEOMoz's top 50 Local Business Citation Directories over a 30 day period, or is it the same if you registered on all of them in 1-2 days. What about larger numbers, registering on 100 national local citation websites, 50 industry related websites, and 15 city related sites. Have you found any large negative ranking effects on registering on all of them for your clients in say a 10-20 period rather than stretching out the registration process over say 3 months.. Jeff
Image & Video Optimization | | WebBizIdeas0 -
Effect of Google Place listing on organic rankings
Is it true that Google place listing can provide increase in search engine ranking ?
Image & Video Optimization | | seoug_20050 -
How to Determine the value of a Paid Legal Directory
I am considering paying for a listing on the legal directory on FindLaw.com, at a cost of $300 per month. This includes 5 deep links back to our site. I think the value of the listing and profile is next to 0 other than the SEO benefit to obtain a competitive position on the first page of the google map. But I am having a hard time ascertaining the SEO value. They have a page rank of 7 (at times 8 in the past). I have already done many of the other directories, dmoz, BOTW, yahoo! and have a regular blog on my site and lots of content. Will this contribute any noticeable SEO difference? Any thoughts? recommendations? If this will contribute a noticeable SEO difference, then imo it is definitely worth it.
Image & Video Optimization | | jfeld2220