Directories – Can Be a Good Bet

Most marketers know to submit their new sites to the Yahoo directory and to DMOZ. Beyond that, it can sometimes be very overwhelming to find which directory is right, since there are an overwhelming amount of them.

The two main reasons to submit a site to a directory is to: a) get more traffic; b) rank better on search engines. Since there are a lot of blogs and forums that cover how to rank better on search engines, I am going to talk about the “getting more traffic” goal.

Where is the User?

When I am starting a marketing campaign, I put myself in the shoes of the consumer. I check search volumes on certain key terms in Google related to the industry, then I search on the ones with the most. I then go to major industry sites, to see if they make any recommendations. If possible, I also do interviews and surveys, finding out what sites prospects frequent during the decision-making process and I check them out.

While on my search, I imagine the demographics of the user and what kind of site would appeal to them. Unfortunately, there are a lot of link farms out there and also fake directories that don’t really get much traffic. You can get some idea about traffic by checking the PR of the site, and by looking at Alexa and other traffic estimating sites (the are just guides and not perfect tools).

Finding Good Directories

In certain industries, such as the vertical market software industry, directories such as Capterra are a very useful marketing tool. Although they have a “no follow” link, meaning it does not affect your PR for search engine rankings, it is still useful when it comes to getting direct traffic. A directory like Capterra does the online marketing for you, with high organic Google rankings and an exhaustive PPC campaign for each category that it represents. From the user point of view, it offers a comprehensive shopping experience where they can find the main vendors within their industry all in one place. They can also search by features, industry and more.

For one client (who will remain nameless so competitors do not copy their campaign) we set up a test in Capterra at a low dollar per click amount in several categories and checked clicks and conversions in Google Analytics. After a couple of months, it became clear that we were getting a much higher conversion rate in one of the categories than we did in all others. We decided to up our spend on Capterra in that category, and remove the other two.

Directories was such a successful strategy for this client, that we ended up pursuing more of them and found the cost-per-conversion beginning to fall significantly lower than it was in Google Adwords. In the end, based on the data, they decided to focus only on directories, and shut down the Adwords campaign altogether.

Lessons

In general, it is very worthwhile to add directories to your online marketing mix, but it is worthwhile to take a careful approach. This not only helps you spend your budget wisely, it also helps you understand the way your customers make decisions.