Guide
The directories worth listing a local business on in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, in the order the listings should go in, with what to skip. It is a short list on purpose: every listing beyond the useful ones is a place your details can go wrong.
Google, Apple, Bing and Facebook, before any directory. Everything else on this page is there to agree with them.
A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on another site, linked or not. The lists people sell run to fifty or a hundred directories, and most of those are dead pages that nobody visits. What local search actually reads is a handful of profiles, a few data companies that feed everyone else, the general directories people in your country still open, and the ones specific to your trade. This page is that handful, and the order matters more than the count.
These are not directories. They are the listings the search engines and the map apps read directly, and the rest of the page is measured against them. Google’s own guidelines for representing a business ask for the name, address and phone number the business uses in the real world, written the same way it appears on the shopfront and the invoices. Decide that spelling once, write it down, and use it on every listing that follows.
The listing behind the map pack and the knowledge panel. Everything else on this page exists to agree with it.
The listing Apple Maps, Siri and the Wallet use. Claimed separately from Google, and almost always forgotten.
The listing behind Bing and the assistants that draw on it. It can import from your Google profile.
Kept for the name, address, phone and hours as much as for the posts. Its About section is a citation people actually read.
A few companies hold business records and supply them to the smaller directories and to the apps that put a business on a map. A correct record with them reaches sites you will never visit; so does a wrong one, which is why they come straight after the profiles and before any directory. These three are the American ones; the British, Australian and Canadian directories draw on their own telephone-directory publishers, which are named in their sections below.
A business data provider whose records other directories and apps buy in.
Its Places data sits behind a great many apps that show a business on a map.
A local business data provider that feeds listings to other sites.
Named rather than linked, because this site links only to sources; each one is found by its name in a minute. Every directory below answered on the day this page was written, and the check is recorded so it can be repeated. A general directory is one a customer might open for any business; a trade directory is one they open for your kind of work, and the second kind carries more weight for less effort.
The general directories first, in the order a customer is likely to meet them, then the ones for trades and services.
The British directories are fewer and older than the American ones, and two of the most useful are trade sites rather than general ones.
Australia has its own Yellow Pages and White Pages, and a set of home-grown directories that carry more weight there than the American names.
The Canadian list is short, and the two telephone directories still matter more than most of the newer sites.
The strongest citations are the ones no general list can give you, because they belong to your trade or your street. The professional register you are already on, where your trade has one: the dental or medical council, the law society, the licensing board for builders and electricians. The trade association’s member directory. The local chamber of commerce. Your suppliers’ “where to buy” or “find an installer” pages. The community site or the local paper’s business listing. Each of these is a listing only a real business in that place can hold, which is exactly why it counts, and almost all of them are free to a member who asks.
Hundreds of listings on directories nobody visits, each one a copy of your details that will drift out of date and each one a place a wrong phone number can live for years.
A listing that exists to be bought is not a citation anyone trusts, and a paid link is the one thing the search engines say plainly they do not want.
One trading name, one address written one way, one phone number. A second name for a second service, or an old number left on an old listing, is how two half-businesses end up competing with each other.
Every directory you join is a place you now have to update when the hours or the number change. Join the ones on this page and the ones for your trade, and stop.
Write the canonical name, address and phone number in one place before you start, and copy from that document every time. When anything changes, change the four profiles and the aggregators the same day, then the directories, then the trade listings, and keep the list of where the business is listed with the document, because the directory you forget is the one that will still be ringing the old number in three years. Once a year, search the old number and the old address in quotation marks and correct whatever comes up. The local SEO checklist holds the rest of the local job, and the Business Profile audit is the place to start if the profile itself is the problem.
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether businesses still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
The listings above claimed and corrected for you, the old ones found and fixed, and the one document that holds the canonical details kept with your site, so nothing drifts.
Any mention of the business name, address and phone number on another site, linked or not. The listing on Yelp is one; so is the line on the chamber of commerce page. What makes a citation useful is that the three details match the Google Business Profile exactly.
The ones on this page for your country, and the directories specific to your trade. The number matters far less than the match: a dozen listings that agree do more than a hundred that do not, and every listing beyond the useful ones is another place a detail can go wrong.
No. A citation is the name, address and phone number; a link is welcome where the directory offers one, but a listing without a link still counts, and most of the listings that matter are read by people rather than followed by crawlers.
Companies that hold business records and supply them to other directories and apps. A correct record with them spreads to sites you will never visit, and a wrong one does the same, which is why they come straight after the four profiles.
A service that submits the list on this page for you saves an afternoon and nothing else; one that promises hundreds of listings is selling the bulk offers this page tells you to avoid. If you pay anyone, pay them to fix the old, wrong listings first.
Claim them and correct them, one by one, starting with the four profiles and the aggregators. Where a directory will not let you edit, ask it to remove the listing. An old number that still rings on Yelp is a customer lost twice.
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