5 Free Places To List Your Business

1. Google My Business

The first and most obvious choice is Google My Business. For free you can add your business as long as you offer a service where people can visit you or you visit people as part of your service. This will cover the majority of businesses. However if you operate an ecommerce operation where you simply take orders and and either outsource or dropship fulfillment you might find you aren’t valid to list your business with google.

If you do meet the criteria you can leverage the power of Google to add some free exposure to your business by appearing prominently in search results and in map searches.

Of course most people are aware of the ubiquitous nature of google but this article on Semrush has all the numbers. 4.3 Billion users worldwide means you are sure to find users searching for a business or service like yours. Google is a fantastic opportunity to inform potential clients of the reasons they should use your business. Once verified you can accept and respond to messages through your Google My Business account, collect reviews and post updates about your business. Such as special offers and special events.

These are excellent marketing and SEO opportunities with some good joined up thinking.

2. Bing Places

Easy to overlook when you are thinking about the numbers but still not insignificant is Bing Places. Although Bing only accounted for 9.61% of searches in the UK as of September 2021, that is still almost 1 in 10 people using Bing in the UK. I know, I’m surprised too.

The big plus when signing up for Bing places is that you can sync all of your data over from Google My Business if you already have that set up. Making Bing Places one of the easiest places to list your business. You can just sync your details over by granting Bing access to the Google account that is responsible for Google My Business.

It really is a 5 minute job.

3. Cylex

Online business directory https://www.cylex-uk.co.uk/ is a quick and easy place to list your business. Cylex has pretty much every imaginable category of business available and over 1 million unique daily users so there is a good chance you may find someone looking for your type of business.

3. Yell

Yell is probably the most dominant of the online business directories so it is a wise choice to spend the 15-30 minutes it will take to add your business to their service via a free listing.

You can add all the normal business details including –

• Areas covered
• Services offered
• Opening hours
• Accreditations/awards
• Much more

The yellow pages was synonymous with small business for a long time, so it really does make sense to utilise this free place to list your business, J. R. Hartley would agree with me.

4. Yelp

Yelp is an online business directory that originated in the US. It’s reach is global though now and is thought to reach over 30 million users per month. From a practical point of view, the sign up process and profile building is one of the easiest in this list.

I actually think the design of this directory is one of the most user friendly too and as you can see is heavy on food/takeaway business. If you run a business of that nature in particular you should sign up with Yelp.

5. FreeIndex

FreeIndex is a specific UK online business directory. Similar to those that have come before you should add, and keep consistent details such as opening times, address, contact numbers etc. However a key point to all these listings is that you should keep the business description for each site distinct in some way.

FreeIndex boasts a user base of over 1.5 million registered users and allows users to request quotes from businesses. So if you are in some sort of trade you could easily generate direct business from FreeIndex.

That concludes my list and will get you well on the way to generating more exposure for your business if you set up profiles on each of those websites/platforms.

If you require a website, please get in touch via my contact page or view my services.

Take care

Chris