Post-Pigeon Best Practice: How To Optimize For Internet Yellow Pages & Directories

The recent Google Pigeon update appears to have provided a bit of a traffic upswing for Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and other online business directories, at the cost of individual local businesses’ site rankings in many cases.

In order to cash in on this new paradigm, businesses must once again return to the yellow pages as a source of customer referrals. Here’s how to optimize your presence in IYPs and other directories.

Now, if you’ve been watching the course of local online business trends over the past decade and noted how the internet has impacted both traditional media and their online equivalents, you may be thinking I’ve completely lost the plot by recommending to shift back to Internet Yellow Pages promotional efforts (since many businesses have moved their advertising budgets away from yellow pages).

Search engines and the internet have put some serious dents in old local media powerhouses like yellow pages, newspapers, classifieds, etc. I’ve frequently mentioned in the past how Google and other local search engines were edging out IYPs as the local business information provider-of-choice for consumers. However, the pendulum may be swinging back somewhat now.

As a number of us noted, the recent Pigeon update improved the ranking and visibility of IYPs and directories, and SEMrush and other competitive analytics services are already showing a real upswing in those sites’ visits as a result.

Some of the sites that appear to be showing increases in search referral traffic include Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Yellowbook.com, Insiderpages.com, Smartpages.com and Manta.com:

Top Internet Yellow Pages sites, and even some of the second-tier yellow pages sites, have seen increases in traffic over the past year, particularly after late spring and going into the summer.

Other business review sites also seem to have enjoyed bumps up in rankings in various market/category combinations. Local business reviews sites seem to have benefited in many cases, including Angie’s List, the Better Business Bureau (BBB), HomeAdvisor and probably Yelp (even though SEMrush shows a slight dip downwards for Yelp after June).

avoid using call-tracking numbers for the sake of your overall local SEO healthiness.

A number of directory sites employ call tracking so that they can show more of their sites’ value to advertisers, but these numbers can be detrimental to the rankings of your business in local search, and if the tracking number displays a nonlocal area code, it might have an impact on your conversion rates when consumers are choosing a business.

So use your main local phone number and not an 800 number nor tracking number.

Your Location

Leverage geographic placement with directory sites. Some directory sites will allow you to select multiple cities where your listings may appear – to maximize your visibility in major metro areas, be sure to go to the effort of associated your business listing with as many geographic/city names as applicable.

Directory Site SEO?

Business listings pages from online directory sites are often a type of local search results pages. As such, there are optimization techniques that can enable your business to rise up in their rankings, just as with the local results in the major search engines! So, there is potential you could apply these in order to pop up into the first page of the directory site without incurring advertising or membership fees, if you’re not already there.

Starting with the name — some directories will display businesses according to alphabetical order, so you might be able to reorder or modify your business name in order to pop up onto Page 1 (the BBB.org website is one example).

In most cases, you would likely have to file for a name change or apply for a “Doing Business As” name, and then supply the government approved paperwork to the directory to ask them to change how they list you. (Disclaimer: I do not know the business rules for these sites – they likely differ from organization to organization.)

In yet other cases, the businesses are displayed in order of proximity to the center of the search area – in order to optimize for this, you’d have to alter your address, which might not be worth it for the potential added exposure benefit.

Don’t laugh! Businesses have actually done this to attempt to improve their rankings in search engines, so why not in directory sites, too? (See: Relocation, Relocation, Relocation – A “New” Local Ranking Tactic?)

Optimize

Optimize your business directory profile. There are frequently a number of elements of business directory profiles that may be optimized beyond merely checking to see if your name, address and phone number are correct: business categories, lists of products and services, written descriptions, hours of operations, website link, photos, logos, social media links, and more.

I’ve written about those before, although I was focusing more on search optimization benefits then. Your optimization in this instance should be more focused upon making you as visible and attractive within the directory site as possible.

Review Sites

Improve your presence in reviews sites. For business reviews sites, your promotional value is naturally going to be heavily affected by your overall reviews and ratings.

Obviously, your overall customer service needs to be excellent already – if it is less than what it could be, beef it up by studying companies at the top of the customer service game, like Zappos.

But, there are also things you can do to improve your presence in reviews sites online, such as encouraging happy customers to post reviews, responding capably to feedback, and more. See 4 Go-Tos To Make Online Reviews Work For Your Business.

Social Media

Be sure to connect your directory listings with your social media accounts wherever possible! I’m seeing many instances where a business’s Facebook page is ranking well in the new search results, and consumers may like businesses that appear more open to interacting with them online, so enhance the chances of this happening.

I’ve also seen a lot of instances where businesses have made errors when adding their social media URLs to directory sites, so be sure to check all your links when you look at your listings and directory profile pages.

Analyze

Watch your directory listing over time. Revisit the page where your listing appears at least monthly so you may see if conditions have changed since the last time you viewed your listing. It’s possible that new listings (or new advertisers) could have appeared in the meantime, affecting your business’s directory listing.

Did you know you can see how many visitors were referred from directory sites to your site’s pages in web analytics systems like Google Analytics? I recommend that you compare these referrals before and after you’ve performed optimizations on your listings — if you were successful in your efforts, I would imagine you’ll likely see the referral numbers rise!

Further Increasing Sales

Many businesses have hyper-focused on how they rank and appear in Google and Bing search results, and your presence in that top tier of search is definitely valuable and important. However, using these tips can further optimize your presence in the second tier of search,  thereby increasing your potential customer referrals and associated sales. And, increasing sales is what we’re all after, anyway.