The Most Important Local Business Directories for SEO

We've updated this post for 2016. Check it out here.

While many of your potential customers search Google for information on local services, inevitably a large portion of them find their way to a local business directory. Many of these directories not only have substantial brands/marketing budgets to drive traffic, but they also do well in organic search rankings for important search terms. So even if you can't get your site ranked high for a specific search term, you can appear on the local directory site that ranks for that term. Perhaps even more important is that links to your site and mentions of your business (aka "Local Citations") can help your site rank well in both "national" organic search as well as in the Google Places results (I still can't bring myself to say the "Google+ Local" results).

So with this in mind, we thought it would be helpful to provide a list of the best local business directories for your SEO efforts. While other sites have put together similar lists, invariably they focus on a grab-bag of sites, many of which are irrelevant. We wanted to go for only those that are truly important and worth spending time on.

We have divided them into two lists:

1. The Largest Local Business Directories in the US
2. The Top U.S. Local Citation Sources

The 55 Largest Local Business Directories in the US These local directory sites, according to Compete.com, have the largest amount of traffic and are listed by size – largest first. In cases where the site is more than a directory, such as Mapquest, we have tried to estimate what % of their traffic goes to the directory. Improving your presence on these directories means your business will be exposed to a wide audience of local searchers.

1. Google Places (aka Google+ Local)
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. Yellowpages.com
5. Yelp
6. Local.com
7. WhitePages.com
8. Manta
9. SuperPages
10. CitySearch
11. Patch
12. City-Data
13. MerchantCircle
14. Yellowbook.com
15. Yahoo Local
16. Mapquest
17. Topix
18. DexKnows
19. Yellow.com
20. BBB.org
21. ServiceMagic
22. Angieslist
23. AreaConnect
24. Foursquare
25. AmericanTowns
26. BizJournals
27. LocalGuides
28. 411.com
29. Yellowpages.aol.com
30. Insider Pages
31. MagicYellow
32. Hotfrog.com
33. Mojopages
34. Switchboard
35. Demandforce
36. MojoPages
37. Bundle
38. Metromix
39. Yellowbot
40. Kudzu
41. ShowMeLocal
42. ChamberofCommerce
43. LocalPages
44. YellowMoxie
45. Phonenumber.com
46. Best of the Web Local
47. Yellowise
48. GetFave
49. Tupalo
50. ZipLocal
51. EZLocal
52. CitySquares
53. USCIty.net
54. LocalDatabase

Top U.S. Local Directory Citation Sources GetListed.org and Whitespark.ca recently released some amazing data on the top local citation sources by city and by category. We thought it would be interesting to take that data and determine which directories on average had the most citation influence in the entire country. While it's good to focus on your service area and category for citation building, in most cases, regardless of your location or industry, these are the sites you should almost always include while citation-building.

1. Yellowpages.com
2. Yelp
3. SuperPages
4. CitySearch
5. Yahoo Local
6. Facebook
7. DexKnows
8. Manta
9. BBB.org
10. YouTube
11. City-Data
12. Yellowbook.com
13. Angieslist
14. MerchantCircle
15. ServiceMagic

While a number of expected brands made the list, Facebook and YouTube are perhaps the two biggest surprises here. Then again, they are two of the biggest sites in the world and each has local business content, so perhaps it's no surprise that they would emerge as important citation sources.

How does your business appear on all these sites? Click here to scan your business. It's fast and free.

Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a SEO consultancy focused on enterprise search engine optimization for local media properties and multi-location businesses. He also has a new blog about Apple Maps.