The business directories are very important for businesses because they are indexing all the businesses on location and industry criteria and they are very useful for potential customers who are looking for a company to solve their specific problems. Business directories are usefully because you can lookup for the right company you need, the right partner or for customer companies too. These directories were created and updated manually in the beginning, but nowadays there are automated scripts which do the entire job of collecting and updating the database. With the development of the Internet and of the online market, a company from Asia can have business partners from South Africa, or some company from Europe can sell its products on the American market too, because the online market diminishes the distances very much, and networking is much easier to create with the help of the Internet.
The details of a company available for customers vary from one business directory to another. Some of the mandatory fields for business directories are the name of the company, the address(es), telephone numbers, its location and the type of the service or products provided. Some directories offer users the possibility to write reviews, comments and feedback about the company’s services/products, and some ranking systems are also involved, because you might see on the first page the most appreciated companies, those which have the most positive comments. You might also find the companies categorized by the number of employees, and if you are a small company you can find other small business partners, or, why not, bigger companies to affiliate with.
As I said, in the beginning, the business directories were printed books which contained businesses, categorized on various criteria and the best example is Yellow Pages. This name and concept came in 1883, when a printer ran out of white paper and started using yellow paper for a telephone directory. In 1886 the first Yellow Pages book appeared, and the industry was created. The concept is used globally nowadays and it refers to commercial listings of businesses. Yellow Pages expression is used both in both English speaking and non-English speaking countries. YP are a directory which provides the listing within a specific geographic area and segregated under types of businesses. There are also focused YP listings like Christian Yellow Pages or Business Pages, and these listings are published annually and distributed free to residences within specific areas. Some directories and even Yellow Pages offer complementary listings for premium options and since many of the directories have moved to the Internet you can be listed in these directories easily and become visible in the largest market ever, the online market.
The business directories can be either consumer oriented or business oriented business varieties and these online business directories are known as vertical directories. Even if they offer a lot of information and a good categorization of the businesses, Internet Yellow Pages have a small percentage of the all Internet searches. This happens because the big search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Baidu or Bing have taken the place of business directories, and many people go straight to a search engine rather than looking up for a business directory and searching the business they need from there.
Even if these directories are not search engines, they have search functions and they allow you lookup for specific businesses based on various criteria. Moving on the Internet, specific facilities have been added to the directories and now they allow you check out the web traffic of the website of the company you are looking for, the exposure of their business, you can see if they have good or bad reviews, or you can check how popular their business is.
The business directories
The online business directories are very useful because they are like a library of business in a very large pond, and they help you narrow your search and find exactly what you need. They vary in content and quality and usually these websites, the online business directories are a balance between professional advertising, quality of service, value for money and for business too, and they often offer free listing though there are much more options available for premium clients.
A very important aspect of the business directories is advertising, and this has a very big influence on the listing. Local businesses are now prioritized by the ranking they have in customers’ opinion and by their popularity, but this listing is also influenced by how much they pay for advertising and this puts the businesses in a top position in the search results. The relevance of the services and the products offered by a company is very important in the search algorithm, and the business directories’ search algorithms are adapted so that they bring customers the best results for what they need.
The business directories
The new trends in online business bring us the business video directories, where each company can upload a short video presentation or more advertisements for the services or products they offer. I think that these business video directories are very useful because they bring the company closer to the customer and they make it easier to decide if you want to use their services/buy their products or no.
The business directories are in most of the cases for local businesses and listing your business in those directories is conditioned by the location of your business, and like this you can find for example a Canadian business directory, a specific business directory for London (actually not only one, there are more), some are targeted on businesses in UK, US, Europe and other continents, and this in good because it helps you search in a certain location you are interested in, but I think that global business directories are much better, because they bring customers a larger variety of options.
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