5 Places Where You Can Get Your Business Listed For FREE

If you have a local business or a small business that focuses on a local area, it's important to optimize your website for local searches. We often hear marketers talking about 'online visibility' and 'local SEO', but there’s one thing that’s often missing from the conversation, and that’s how to get your business listed online for free. This article will explore 5 places where you can get your business listed for free (and without having to pay).

1. Local business listings

One of the most important things you can do to help your business succeed is to claim your business on all the local business directories you can find. It’s easy to do and it’s free, so there’s no reason not to do it. There are many directories that have merged together and the one that most of us are familiar with is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Directory of Small Businesses (in Google Drive). Other places to get your business listed include:

Another valuable resource for your local listing is the National Council of Small Business. You can get information about your local government and the legal department for the small business community in your area.

Sure, there are free services online that will do the job for you. But your local newspaper, the Chamber of Commerce, or your county’s website that lists your business might have a lot more data than you can collect with other exploration tools. These will have plenty of data other tools can’t offer, and as a business owner, they’re able to provide direct feedback to you to help you craft your site.

Your town/county/local government website is a great place to start, but you might have greater success launching your business from a non-official website. This is possible because of a cheaper hosting price or because the website isn’t under the domain name registrar or the domain administrator’s direct control. This is a Google-fu and it’s also a free way to get your business out into the internet and into the eyes of your potential customers.

2. Google+ Local page

It’s important to set up a Google+ Local page for your business and get a verified listing. This is important for the ranking, especially if you’re a local business. Google has updated the algorithm and it’s much more important than ever to ensure that you have a verified listing.

It’s possible that you have thousands of reviews and that some of them are in a different city than you personally. This article describes how to run through a company listing using their reviews. If you’d like to learn more about how verified listings work, check out these articles:

Most places will auto-generate a map and link for you to your business listing after they’ve been approved. Before you submit an opening on SEMRush, make sure you apply to use their maps. This helps improve the overall SEMRush experience by making the search results more useful to you.

Mojarra’s guide to getting your business listed quickly is both exhaustive and comprehensive. They use two very important sentences that are extremely useful in optimizing your business’s ranking on all search engines.

Make sure that you have a good location listing, a good contact form (or better yet, an email form), a good FAQ (that answers all the basic questions you can think of), and a good video explaining how your business works.

Another place is Local Solutions.

For the first tip, they provide a detailed tutorial on how to set up a Google Maps link for your business — likely the most important step before you move on to the important phase.

It’s also important when optimizing your Google Reviews for Local to provide a high Google Rank for your listings. If someone isn’t finding your business within ten seconds on Google, they won’t likely find it within the first few pages of the search results.

Just make sure you have answers to all of the questions addressed in their article.

3. Bing Places for Business

Bing Places for Business is a free service that lets businesses manage and update their listings across popular search engines from a single Bing account. All you need to do is select your location and select whether you have business hours or services, then submit and update your information. You can even add social sharing buttons and embed ads from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or other platforms. You don’t need to be, nor do you need to be connected to a specific site or business. You can manage your listings on your own updates page, or through Microsoft’s Bing Ads platform.

To request listing information from Bing I highly recommend signing up for their beta program here. Once you sign up, you’re taken to a page that lets you see if your business needs or wants listing updates from Bing. There’s a fee, but other options exist and if you’re ordering a duplicate account I would recommend registering first so that you can see how quickly the service updates its listings.

There are online tools out there that let you take advantage of AutoMLS and LinkExchange to help you control which sites appear when you type a destination. Remember though that at the end of the day these tools are paid, and we would recommend others check out the free services mentioned before deciding which battle-tested one to choose.

According to Sensor Tower, 30,000+ free online business directories are now available, with millions more to come. Although there is a multitude of services to manage your online presence and localize it for online searches, I wanted to share the ones that I find particularly helpful and have come across consistently as being the most helpful.

Locations can be updated by many search engines, including web SERPs, Open Local, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps (which is not free), Google Maps, or review websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor that employ proprietary data.

4. Yelp

I think that customer service is a really important part of your business and I think that Yelp is very important to have in your business. Yelp gives you the opportunity to have a presence in your local area and gives you the opportunity to be visible. You even have the opportunity to be local if you leverage it.

If you live in the Bay Area, you can look into Torch, they have several listings in San Francisco and Oakland. You can find out more about them on Yelp. Yelp mentions that you can list multiple listings on their platform.

Yelp offers the option to be featured. If you applied, you would get in front of at least 10,000 people and be listed in the discussion. The list would be referred to Yelp and you would be placed on the curated, searchable list of businesses in that area.

Yelp gives you the opportunity to be referred by someone who has already been referred by someone else. You give up that ability by going onto your Resale Hub page and getting manually referred by someone that has been really helpful to you.

If you’re an entrepreneur in San Francisco, there are many listings for you in the secondary market. I have actually used their secondary market to find local businesses that have been closed because of the pandemic or have filed for bankruptcy. In these cases, I’ve used the secondary market to help me find new businesses or products to buy. Yelp has other listings in the secondary market.

In the summer of 2018, I came across Dollar Shave Club (DSC), they were all over the news. They had gone from a couple of thousand email subscribers on Yelp to having over 85,000 on Yelp alone. I did some digging into them and soon realized that they were two guys who were selling some really high-end razors via Instagram Direct.

5. Foursquare

Foursquare is a social media app for checking in to places and finding places that you’re interested in checking out. You can earn badges and level up by checking in and discovering new places. Why is it awesome?

You can check-in virtually anywhere, anytime (to anywhere with Foursquare) 

You get badges for checking in and discovering new places 

You get a free listing when one of your friends checks in at a local business 

Free listings help your business get found online by local people 

How to get a free listing with Foursquare

 1. Visit this page. If you don’t already have a Facebook account, you will need to create one before you can use Foursquare. You will also need an email address which you will use to sign up for your free account. You will be asked to enter this information on the confirmation page.

 2. Click the “Get started” button.

 3. Find your closest supermarket and check it out using Foursquare!

 4. Get a free Foursquare badge! It’ll take a few days for your free badge to appear. Be sure to head to this page to check your badge status in the future if you don’t see your badge within a few days.

 5. If you can’t find your nearest supermarket, sign up using your email address (along with your phone number) to receive notifications when your free badge is available.