The key difference with smaller alternative online business directories compared to the larger players is that many offer their customers much more content for free.  The longer established companies tend to charge £100’s for an advert with similar content.

There are of course many reasons for this including the (publicised) fact that they have a lot of search traffic, through to the (not so publicised) fact that they invariably have a huge workforce to feed from back office staff to sales people, not to mention the funding of their ad campaigns.

There are a few fantastic “free” search engines/directories that are completely self serve i.e. no sales people, or call centers.  Businesses just register and create their own free advert.  These offer predominately Free Advertising for UK businesses, and also offer some optional paid enhancements which is how they fund themselves.

They can do this because the website/directory has been built to require minimal manual intervention, and therefore these companies overheads are very low.  This however does not stop them competing with the bigger players, and indeed offering a free service that is just as good as the paid entries in the larger websites.

Some are better than others of course, and only a few offer a lot of content for free.  As well as your free listing on their directory, the better ones also create a “landing page” behind the scenes that is effectively a web page just with your advert on it.  As part of the free service this “Landing Page” is submitted to major search engines such as Google. Yahoo, Bing, Ask etc so you not only have a listing on the directory you registered with, but also have a listing on these search engines that people can click on and view your advert.

When you consider all this, I would recommend that, even if you pay for an advert on the larger business directories previously mentioned, you also list your business with the top Free Advertising Directories (listed below) too, as every little helps, and these are generating sufficient traffic to make them a viable source of advertising.

On a final note on this, as I mentioned earlier most free directories offer paid enhancements such as a link to your website and some are as low as £9 a year.  I would strongly recommend you take up the website link if it is offered, as it is a much better experience for your potential customer to be given a link through to your website, rather than just a phone number.  Think about it, the customer likes looking online, that is how they found you.  Don’t make them then have to call you to find out information you can give them on your website.  Not only that but your website shows them everything about what you do/can offer, so by all means ignore all the other enhancements, but this is one you should never scrimp on!

The following comparison table shows you all the main players that I think are worth checking out when considering Free Online Advertising and what each offers you for free.

 

Please click on the links below to register your business with these directories:

  BT Tradespace   /  Free Index /  Wampit  /  UK Small Business Directory  /  Local Mole  /  Thomson Local  /  Touch Local  /  Streets Local  /  Yell  /  Scoot

NB:  This comparison table was created in October 2009 and has been compiled from reviewing free content available on each site, and calling those sites where this was not obvious.  If you feel any of the information in this article is inaccurate, please contact us and if necessary we will make immediate amendments.

This is such an important area for businesses to consider, and could impact greatly on the number of potential customers you gain through your online business advertising.  As this area is so important, I am going to get straight to the point:

If you had a shop, would you stop passersby from entering unless they called you first, or alternatively expect them to have to ask around to find out how to get in?  Of course you wouldn’t, however that is exactly what you will be doing if you do not place a link on your business advertising to your own website. 

If you think about it, if you do not place a link on your business advertising you are only leaving a prospective customer with two options: 

1.  Call you on the phone: 

Expecting someone to call you on the telephone immediately after viewing some key details on your advert is not only limiting the number of customers that will call you, but could also force your potential customers to your competitors, particularly if they have an advert in the same place as you but do have a link to their website. 

A potential customer that is browsing an online directory is, at that moment, in the mindset of being “online” – why “force” them to have to go “offline” and make a phone call just because you haven’t given them the option of quickly and easily viewing your website?

When you walk into a shop after looking in the window, you rarely walk straight up to the store manager and demand to buy something.  You usually like to take your time and browse the store looking at prices, dimensions, colours etc before you ask for help.   Well – it is no different in the online world.  Due to the limited content available on most adverts, a customer is likely to want to explore your business offerings further in their own time by easily clicking on a link to your website. 

Your advert in effect is your shop window as it contains the key information / images etc that you feel will entice a potential customer to use you.  You need a “door” on that advert that enables someone to go directly into your “online shop” so you can keep the customers journey focused, and hopefully from there, once they have had all the information you can offer, they will either purchase/book online or call you, or visit your premises.

2.  Try to find your website on an alternative search engine: 

This one amazes me!  You would be surprised by the number of advertisers that waste valuable text space on an advert by putting things like “Google us to find our website”.  Think about it from a prospective customers point of view… can we really expect a customer to leave the site they’re on, remember the company name they have just viewed, launch Google and search for that company, find the link in the results and then click on the right one to launch your website?  Would you do that?  Especially when the their competitors advert may be just below them, with a link to their website.

Or the other one we see from time to time is “visit A7aerialsdotcom”.  Again this is expecting the potential customer to have to copy and paste or manually retype the text (correctly) into the browser and hit go.  Again, will customers be bothered to do this, particularly when some of your competitor adverts will have a nice simple link button on their advert directly to their web site?

I hope this blog has made you look again at the importance of linking your advertising to your website.  There are many online business search engines / directories out there, and they all offer a link to your website  (free or paid), however the price business directories charge is usually very low due to the importance and commonality of web links.  For example BT Tradespace offer a free web link, and here at Wampit we only charge £19 a year.  However, other directories are still charging anyting up to £300 so be careful and spend your money wisely.

For the reasons mentioned above, a web link is a vital part of your online business UK advertising, and if you have a business website your business advertising should always link to it from as many online directories as you can….

Wampit® is a free UK business directory offering high quality advert listings for all companies.  Simply visit wampit.co.uk to register, and create your free advert listing in minutes.

Wampit® was created by UK entrepreneurs Paul Holland and Adam Purrier who decided to use their wealth of experience gained within the advertising industry to create a new breed of business search engine / directory.

Adam and Paul believe that Internet business advertising is still ‘traditionally old school’ and ‘sales focused’ and wanted to bring in a more modernised approach to online business directories.

Working from offices in London, they decided to create a UK business search engine that is not only at the forefront of the developing online video revolution, but also takes in the ethos of social networking i.e. free rich content such as video and images and live twitter feeds.

Let’s break these down further to explain why Wampit® has focussed primarily on these two areas:

The Online Video Revolution:

• The growth of online video has been unprecedented with the number of videos viewed online in the UK growing nearly 50 per cent year on year (source – comScore).
• Businesses are starting to understand that video is something they now need to consider in their marketing arsenal, as it can be the closest thing they can offer their potential customers to actually being there.
• As with any “new opportunities” businesses such as online video production companies are a growth area charging up to £1000 for a professional business promotional video.  Wampit enables you to upload a video for free whether it has been professionally or home produced.
• With the quality of even basic digital camcorders and phones today businesses can make their own video/clip of their products, service, premises and upload it onto their free Wampit advert in minutes.
• The growth of online video is greatly supported by the belief that video increases online conversion rates by up to 300%

The Social Networking Revolution:

• 38 percent of British Internet users now have a social networking site profile which is up from 22 percent in 2007 (source – Ofcom)
• This means that people are not only used to but “expect to” create a profile for free using rich content such as video, images etc.
• Wampit is the first true business search engine that allows you to create your business listing for free using content such as images/video.
• The growth of social networking websites and blogs now account for nearly ten percent of the total time spent on the Internet, exceeding even email, according to a new study released by Nielsen Online.
• 17 per cent of all time spent on the Internet in August took place on either social networking or blogging sites – a 300 per cent increase from the previous year. (source – The Nielsen Company)
• Twitter has also rapidly become the darling of the Internet and approx 19% of Internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others which is an 8% growth since April 09 (source – Pew Research)
• Wampit® is the first UK business directory that enables all businesses to simply create a “live twitter feed” onto their listing to display their latest tweets.

So you can now see why Wampit® has been created for UK businesses, and  in summary,  it offers quality free business advertising listings that are rich in content and innovative in their design (video/Twitter feeds).

Importantly the Wampit® site is clean and easy to use for businesses and users alike, with no superfluous information or third party advertising.  Businesses can register themselves and create their free business advert by completing one, easy to follow registration page.  Also, once registered they can log back in at any time to update / amend their details.

Each business that registers also gets their own individual “landing page” which Wampit® automatically submits to major search engines in order to provide further exposure for their listing, as well as drive traffic back to the site.

To find out more about what Wampit.co.uk offers visit: http://www.wampit.co.uk/freebusinessadvertising.aspx

Or just visit the site and create your Free Advert today: http://www.wampit.co.uk/

For further reading and information, please also visit the Wampit® blog comparing and recommending that you also advertise on the top 10 free business advertising directories such as  BT Tradespace (British Telecom), Free Index, Thomson Local, Yell.com  ( Yell Group / Yellow Pages / Yellow-Advertising ), Scoot and five others…