Boost Your Site with Business Listings

March 8th, 2006 by Chris

I just wrote a new article, Using Business Listings to Harness the Power of Local Search, it is about how you can implement a database of small businesses on your site to build traffic by getting listed in local searches.

This trick is so easy and so powerful I really considered not sharing it. I can’t give away all my tricks afterall. But I figured that with everyone moving over from SitePoint I should give them a reward.

It is really quite amazing just what can be accomplished by placing business listings on your website. I would estimate an increase of uniques on the scale of one per every 5 business listings you publish. When you’re publishing thousands of business listings that can be pretty substantial.

Simply putting up a business directory with Adsense ads you could garner as much as $10 a day or more, which isn’t bad at all for a site that requires no updating.

There is of course a risk of too many people following my advice, duplicate content, search engine penalties (such as what happened to AWS sites) and the like. So it might be wise to differentiate your content by taking it a step further and offering reviews. Sure, it might take awhile to build up a sizable library of business reviews, but when you do it will make your site much more likely to survive any backlash targeted towards business listings.

Also in the article is a little mini review of Oddity Software. Oddity Software is a great little company that compiles and sells content databases for website publishers, are very reasonable prices too. When I look through their content listings I get dozens of ideas for new websites. I highly recommend checking them out.

No related posts.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization, Website Promotion »  by: Chris

11 Responses to “Boost Your Site with Business Listings”

  1. Shawn Weeks  Says:
    March 8th, 2006 at 10:51 am

    Well, I figured you guys would catch on eventually. :)

  2. Shawn Weeks  Says:
    March 8th, 2006 at 10:55 am

    Oh, and Oddity Software is not very impressive. The databases are very poorly put together (but they’re dirt cheap). Don’t expect quality, expect quantity.

  3. Chromate  Says:
    March 8th, 2006 at 4:42 pm

    Oh, man. Why did you have to go and blog about this? ;)

  4. Michael Gersitz  Says:
    March 9th, 2006 at 11:13 am

    Good Tips, Not really interested though. Seems too boring for me.

  5. Peach  Says:
    March 9th, 2006 at 3:45 pm

    Thanks for sharing.
    Can anyone recommend a good script/CMS that can be used to publish the business directory?

  6. Masetek  Says:
    March 9th, 2006 at 4:32 pm

    You would need a custom script because al the databases for sale have different fields. I custom script wouldn’t be hard to write.

  7. Ozgression  Says:
    March 9th, 2006 at 9:14 pm

    A nice advice, but hardly earth shattering stuff. “Local search” is a growth market for sure, but there are better.

  8. Peach  Says:
    March 10th, 2006 at 10:44 am

    Masetek, I was told it’s fairly easy to convert any database into the native db structure of most CMS

  9. Masetek  Says:
    March 11th, 2006 at 5:25 pm

    I guess you could just write a script for it :)

  10. Peter  Says:
    March 24th, 2006 at 9:35 am

    I bought one of their business databases and the quality is really bad, I mean really bad. It looks like they or their vendor scraped the listings from yellow pages, but they didn’t do it properly and the data in many listings is mixed. Also the listings look rather old (old business addresses, old phones, etc.), which make them useless.

    It was waste of money.

    Peter

  11. Devon Wright  Says:
    April 12th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Peter, did you get the MS Access version or a MySQL dump, what did you receive?

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