Adding a Directory to Website
-
Hiya! So we have an odd request and we wanted to see if want we want to do will add any SEO benefit. We operate a printing/design firm in Houston, Texas and have been thinking of adding a directory to our website. It would sit on our top level domain www.website.com/print-directory, it would much be a like a yelp directory listing all the print, design, and bindery shops all across the USA. We want to expand our footprint online and and to boost to our position in other cities. For example Yelp is always the top spot when you search for (CITY) + (PRINTING)/(DESIGN) the yelp directories pull up first. Now... i know why this is with their DA/UR off the charts. We have vendor that will provide all the info/data/images of all businesses in the USA something around 5K business so. The design will mesh with our current design and look seamless with the current design.The idea is that we would populate and optimize all the city pages for all those cities and provide content on each major city. So we can optimize with H tags, keywords and interlink all the other pages plus not to mention we have a great blog section and plan on interlink that throughout website. The catch would be..... is that we would put our listing first, on top of all those other local shops. Maybe we would do this for all of them but maybe a few of our target cities. We would use our addresses and nothing would be faked.
URL Structure www.website.com/print-directory/austin-texas/printshops/ABCPrinter/
Questions
-
Would this confuse Google and cause some issues with our current SERPS? We do very well in our home city and don't want to jeopardize all our hard work. Or real harm or benefit just seems to confusing people?
-
Could we get penalized?
-
Content would be unique (except listing information)
-
-
Properly implemented, curated, and maintained, there's not really a risk of problems with Google. It's just that for 99% of them there's so little-if any-ranking benefit to it, why bother. It's not necessarily great for your brand, either.
-
Thanks for the reply! I agree with you that its a risky proposition and marketing funds could be better used elsewhere. But humor me.... if lets say we have a small listings section of people we recommend or we work with will Google have an issue with this per se?
-
There are LOTS of potholes on that path because it is an extremely well-worn path and many a hopeful implementer have ended up wishing they'd gone another route. Take it from them--spend your time and/or money on building person to person relationships with your local business and figuring out with them how your businesses (and your customers) complement each other and work those relationships into links between your website brands. That's how real businesses do it and that's what the search engines reward. : )
Cheers
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
-
Adding Multiple Country Locations for Google Business Listings
Hi Moz community, I hope everyone is well. I would like to ask for your advice on how to show a Google Business listing in both the UK and US for our brand. I understand that you can add multiple locations to your Google listing under the 'Manage Locations' tab but I wasn't quite sure how it worked in practice. I have a couple of questions below: If we have 2 registered locations/offices (one in the UK and one in the US) are we able to create 2 separate locations that will show our business listing correctly in the right-hand margin when people search for our brand in the US and UK respectively? If so, when a user finds our business listing in the US, are we able to serve them our US website version when they click the 'Website' button, as opposed to showing them our UK website? Our US website has been created as a sub-directory from our main UK site and can be seen as: www.example.com/us/ I hope someone is able to help, and thank you in advance.
Local Listings | | Katarina-Borovska
Katarina0 -
Are there any online directories that an online ONLY store should list itself in?
I watched the Whiteboard Friday Video about this, but didn't hear it deal with directories exclusively. Should an online only store use online directories- and if so, how? Would there be a NAP involved?
Local Listings | | Edward_Sturm0 -
Address consistency issue between GMB and directories
We have a mortgage broker client, ABC, who shares an address with another business, XYZ who is a loans company. A previous SEO agency created GMBs for these 2 businesses using the same physical address and recently, we had to resolve this issue of duplicate address with Google. ABC was happy for us to fix the issue up by putting a unit no. "A" thus making their address "#7A Smith Street" and business XYZ now has #7B on their GMB. Our question is will this affect consistency if we were to build citations without "#7A Smith Street" but just using "7 Smith Street" which is their REAL physical address? Business XYZ has also just contracted us for SEO which means we will end up building citations for 2 businesses with the same business address (but different phone numbers). Should we actually continue using "#7A" and "#7B" for citation building even though that's not what their address is? Thank you in advance for your response!
Local Listings | | Gavo1 -
Will using call tracking phone numbers in paid legal directories listing negatively affect our website?
I know it is important to have consistent NAP across directory listings but I would like to gauge the ROI on the paid "premium" listings in legal directories like FindLaw, AVVO and Lawyers.com by using call tracking and recording. Could using different phone #'s in these listings affect our website negatively? Same question for YELP ads (ads only, not organic yelp listing).
Local Listings | | SEO4leagalPA0 -
Using same business number on different websites
Hello, I have number of websites in different locations with different business name and address with verified listings. However, I am thinking to use the same phone number on all the websites as it is difficult for me to keep track of all the numbers. So, is it okay to use the same phone number on different websites with different business name and address? Waiting for your thoughts. Brian
Local Listings | | BrianBotts.0 -
Multiple listing directory pages pointing back to the same local business profile
I've been tuning my SEO pages to cover cities, states, and metro areas for local businesses we have. I'm wondering if the same business showing up on multiple pages, because they can actually go out and service that area, has a negative impact on rankings. Does multiple pages on your site, pointing to the same content, hurt or help the ranking of either page?
Local Listings | | All-About-Labor0 -
Has anyone ever used a specific page (instead of home page) when building links in directories?
Instead of the home page, have you ever done (domain)/page-1 for the URL in directories? I figured this would be a good way to build some page authority up for deeper pages for small businesses that can't seem to garner any attention with content / links. BTW, these directories are not considered spam directories. Thanks, Cole
Local Listings | | ColeLusby0 -
One company - 2 websites
One of our clients decided to launch a 2nd website to market specific products and services that they provide. The trouble is, they have the same address, phone number and have a similar name. Whilst we have had some success and both websites are on page 1 for their primary keywords, I have a bad feeling that they may have hit a glass ceiling. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to perform local SEO?
Local Listings | | maxweb0