What directory submission is, and how its SEO role changed

I want to walk through a piece of work I did last year for a regional law firm, because it captures almost everything you need to know about directory submission in 2024. It includes the parts people get wrong, the parts that still genuinely matter, and the parts where I had to admit I could not prove what I thought I was proving. If you have inherited a backlink profile with hundreds of directory listings and you are not sure what to do with them, this is the article I wish someone had handed me when I was twenty-eight.

Directory submission, in case anyone reading this is newer to SEO, is the practice of adding your business to an online list of websites organised by category, location, or industry. That is the boring definition. The interesting question is whether it does anything for your rankings, your traffic, or your phone line. The answer used to be a clear yes. Now it is “sometimes, in specific ways, if you are careful.”

The client situation: a regional law firm with stalled rankings

The firm has four solicitors, two paralegals, and an office in a market town in the East Midlands. They handle conveyancing, wills and probate, and some family law. Their organic traffic had been flat for three years. Their previous agency had been billing them GBP 1,200 a month for “ongoing SEO” which, as far as I could tell from the work logs, consisted mostly of adding them to more directories.

Inherited backlink profile from 2014

When I pulled their backlink profile, I counted 312 directory listings, of which roughly 80% had been built between 2011 and 2015. The pattern was familiar: an SEO supplier in that era had run them through every general business directory that would take a submission, then come back the next year and done it again on a different list. There were entries on sites I had not seen mentioned in a decade. Some of the domains still resolved but had not been updated since George Osborne was Chancellor.

The firm’s Google Business Profile, by contrast, was a mess. Wrong opening hours, an old phone number on three of the citations, no posts since 2019, and a category set to “Legal services” rather than the more specific “Solicitor” that would have matched their actual practice. This is depressingly common. The thing that mattered most was the thing nobody had touched.

Why directory submissions kept appearing in their reports

The monthly reports the firm received listed “12 new directory submissions” as a line item every month. The partners had no way to evaluate whether this was useful. It sounded like work; it produced a number; the number was positive. I suspect the agency itself had stopped questioning the practice years earlier because the client never did. Inertia is a powerful force in this industry.

The audit question that started everything

The brief I was given was open: “Tell us what is working and what is not.” The question I asked myself, sitting with their Search Console data on a Tuesday morning, was narrower. Of those 312 directory listings, how many had ever sent the firm a single click, and of those that had not, how many were dragging down the trust of the wider link profile? That question organises everything that follows.

How directories actually worked in 2008 versus now

To make sensible decisions about which listings to keep, I needed the partners to understand why their old listings were built in the first place. So I gave them a short history lesson. I will give you the same one, condensed.

The DMOZ-era trust signal

In the mid-2000s, Google’s algorithm leaned heavily on link signals from human-curated directories. DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) was the canonical example; a listing there carried real weight because a human editor had reviewed the submission. Yahoo’s directory charged $299 a year and people paid it because the link mattered. Directories run by trade associations carried weight by association. Adding your business to a credible directory was a way of saying “a third party has confirmed we exist and we are what we say we are.”

That was the model. Submission services emerged to industrialise it, and that is when the problems started.

What Penguin changed for low-effort submissions

Google’s Penguin update in April 2012, and the refreshes through 2016 when it was rolled into the core algorithm, targeted manipulative link patterns. Directory networks that existed only to host outbound links, sites with thousands of “businesses” listed under identical templated descriptions, and reciprocal-link directories all lost most or all of their pass-through value. Some of them dragged down the sites linking from them; many were demoted to the point where the links did nothing at all, positive or negative.

The practical consequence is that most directory listings built before 2014 by an SEO agency on the cheap are now somewhere on a spectrum from worthless to mildly toxic. The expensive ones are usually fine. The free ones are usually not.

Why some directories still pass real value

This is where the conversation gets more subtle, and where I see a lot of people lazily declaring that “directories are dead.” They are not dead. A few categories still matter.

Local citation sources (Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell, Thomson Local in the UK) are foundational for local SEO because they feed the entity-resolution systems that decide whether your business is real and where it operates. Directories curated by trade bodies (the Law Society’s “Find a Solicitor” for my client; STEP for estate-planning specialists) pass both link value and qualified referral traffic. Editorially curated general directories with real human review and a meaningful submission process can still help, especially for newer sites that need some baseline link diversity.

The OnToplist analysis puts it well: directories rely on real people to manually review and categorise websites, which gives them an accuracy advantage over scraped databases. The flip side is that directories without that human curation step have no such advantage, and you can usually tell which is which within thirty seconds of looking at their submission form.

architecture-beta
  group seo(cloud)[Citation Ecosystem]
  service gbp(server)[Google Profile] in seo
  service citations(database)[Local Citations] in seo
  service industry(internet)[Legal Directories]
  service firm(disk)[Law Firm Site]
  gbp:R --> L:citations
  citations:B --> T:firm
  industry:R --> L:firm

Building the triage framework

With 312 listings to evaluate I needed a repeatable process, not gut feel. I built a spreadsheet and a four-question filter.

The four-question filter I ran each listing through

For each directory I asked four things. One, does the directory have any organic traffic of its own, as estimated by Ahrefs or Semrush? If the directory cannot rank for its own category terms, no human will ever find my client through it. Two, is the directory topically or geographically relevant to the firm? A solicitor on a global “free SEO submission” list is not relevant to anything. Three, does the listing page itself get indexed by Google? You can check this directly with a site: query. Four, is there any evidence of editorial standards, even minimal ones, such as approval delays, duplicate-listing rejection, or a contact-able editor?

A directory that scored well on three or four of these went into the “keep” pile. Two out of four was the marginal middle. One or zero, I marked for removal.

Citation directories versus link directories

I want to draw a distinction that practitioners often blur. A citation directory’s primary purpose is to confirm your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) across the web; the link is a secondary benefit. A link directory’s primary purpose is to provide a backlink; any business description is incidental. You evaluate these on different terms.

For citation directories the question is “does this source feed local-search entity graphs?” For link directories the question is “does this pass meaningful PageRank or referral traffic?” Confusing the two leads to bad decisions in both directions: people disavow useful citations because they do not see SEO link value, and people keep useless link directories because the entry confirms their address.

When to disavow versus when to leave alone

Disavowing links is something I do reluctantly. Google’s own guidance has, over the years, moved towards “we are usually good at ignoring spammy links, so do not bother disavowing them unless you have received a manual action.” That guidance is partly true and partly Google managing its own workload. In practice, when a profile has hundreds of low-quality listings concentrated in one period of time, the disavow file is still useful insurance.

My rule of thumb: if a directory is dead (no traffic, no indexing, no editorial life signs) I leave it alone. Google probably already ignores it. If a directory is clearly part of a private blog network or link scheme and is still active, I disavow it. The difference is whether Google might mistake the link for an editorial endorsement.

Walking through 312 existing listings

The triage took about three working days. I will not pretend this is glamorous work; it is the SEO equivalent of cleaning out a garage. But the results were instructive.

pie title Triage outcome of 312 inherited directory listings
  "Removed or disavowed" : 180
  "Middle tier reviewed" : 85
  "Kept after filter" : 47

The 47 we kept and why

Forty-seven listings survived the filter. The bulk of these fell into three groups. First, the foundational local citations: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell, Thomson Local, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the council’s business directory. Second, the legal-industry sources: the Law Society’s “Find a Solicitor,” The Legal 500 (where they had a modest entry), Solicitors Regulation Authority records, and two local solicitor referral schemes. Third, a handful of well-maintained general business directories that still send measurable referral traffic. Web Directory was in that third group, having sent a small but steady trickle of referrals each quarter according to the Analytics data I went back and checked.

The interesting thing was the geographic concentration. Of the 47 we kept, 31 were either local to the East Midlands or were national directories with a working local-search filter. Locality matters more than volume.

Patterns in the 180 we removed

The 180 listings I marked for removal or disavowal showed clear patterns. Most were on domains that had not added a new business listing since 2016. Many shared a footer link to a single SEO agency in Pakistan or the Philippines, suggesting they were operated as a network. A subset used the exact same templated description for the firm, word-for-word identical, which told me the original agency had bulk-submitted using a service like SubmitEdge or one of its imitators.

I requested removal directly from about forty of these, got a response from about six, and disavowed the remainder.

Surprises in the middle tier

The middle tier (85 listings, scoring two out of four) is where judgement matters most. Some of these turned out to be hidden gems: an obscure conveyancing-related directory I had never heard of was sending two or three qualified leads a month, despite ranking for nothing of consequence. The traffic was almost entirely direct from professionals who used the site as a reference. I kept it.

Others were technically passable but contained outdated information about the firm. For those, I updated the listing rather than removing it. About a third of the middle tier was eventually moved to “keep” after correction, the rest to “remove.”

The submission decisions for new placements

Cleanup was half the job. The other half was deciding where to add the firm next. I was working with a modest budget of about GBP 2,000 for new placements over the year, which forced discipline.

requirementDiagram
  requirement keep_listing {
    id: 1
    text: a listing shall be kept only if it scores three or four on the filter
    risk: medium
    verifymethod: inspection
  }
  requirement nap_consistency {
    id: 2
    text: citation directories shall hold accurate matching NAP data
    risk: high
    verifymethod: analysis
  }
  element four_question_filter {
    type: audit
  }
  element search_console {
    type: measurement
  }
  four_question_filter - verifies -> keep_listing
  search_console - satisfies -> nap_consistency

Industry-specific directories worth the fee

The two paid placements I recommended were both legal-industry sources. The Legal 500 upgrade from a free entry to a researched profile cost a few hundred pounds and gave the firm a credible third-party reference they could cite on their own site. A specialist conveyancing-quality scheme membership (CQS, run by the Law Society) cost more but carried both a directory listing and a quality mark that mattered to mortgage lenders. Neither of these is what most people mean by “directory submission,” but functionally that is what they are: paid placements in curated lists that potential clients consult.

This is where I think the framing of directory submission is most useful: stop thinking of it as a backlinks exercise and start thinking of it as choosing which credible lists you want to be on. That mental shift changes the budgeting conversation entirely.

Local citations that moved the needle

The free citation work mattered more than I had initially expected. Cleaning up the Google Business Profile, then ensuring NAP consistency across the top fifteen local citation sources, produced a measurable shift in local pack visibility within three months. I had budgeted no money for this, only time, and it was probably the highest-leverage work of the entire project.

The Search Engine Journal piece on directories worth using has a reasonable list of the foundational citation sources if you want a starting point. I would add that for UK businesses, the local council’s business directory and the regional Chamber of Commerce are often overlooked and frequently rank for “town + service” queries that the big aggregators do not.

What we declined despite vendor pressure

Three vendors approached the firm during the engagement offering directory packages. One offered “500 directory submissions for GBP 299.” One offered a “premium business directory network” for GBP 79 a month. One pitched an AI-powered “automated citation building service” for GBP 450 a month. I told the partners to decline all three, and to be polite but firm about it.

The GBP 299 package would have rebuilt exactly the kind of profile we had just cleaned up. The GBP 79 monthly subscription was for a network of sites I traced back to two related domains. The AI service was actually building real citations, but at a rate the firm could have matched manually for the cost of two hours of a virtual assistant’s time per month.

Results after eight months

I want to be honest about what I can and cannot prove from the data we collected over the next eight months. SEO causality is hard, and anyone who tells you they can cleanly attribute every ranking change to a specific intervention is either lying or has a much simpler client than I do.

journey
  title Eight-month engagement outcomes
  section Cleanup
    Audit 312 listings: 2: Consultant
    Clean GBP and citations: 4: Consultant
    Submit disavow file: 3: Consultant
  section Placements
    Legal 500 upgrade: 4: Consultant
    CQS quality scheme: 4: Consultant
  section Results
    Local pack 2 to 7: 5: Client
    Referral traffic triples: 5: Client
    Organic clicks up 34 percent: 5: Client

Local pack visibility shifts

The clearest win was local pack visibility. Tracking ten priority “service + town” queries, the firm appeared in the local three-pack for two of them at the start of the engagement and for seven of them by month six. The shift lined up tightly with the GBP cleanup and citation consistency work. I am reasonably confident this was causal because the timing was so close and the firm had not changed anything else about its on-site content or its review-acquisition practices in that window.

Referral traffic from three unexpected sources

Referral traffic from directory sources tripled, though from a small base. The three biggest contributors were not the ones I had predicted. The Law Society’s “Find a Solicitor” tool, which we had updated rather than newly submitted, sent more qualified contact-form completions than anything else. A regional Chamber of Commerce directory I had nearly cut from the keep list outperformed every general business directory combined. And a niche conveyancing comparison site that the firm had been listed on since 2015, which I had marked as marginal, sent three actual instructed cases.

The lesson I take from this is that I am bad at predicting which directories will produce referrals, and humility is appropriate. The audit framework I described is good at removing the obvious junk, but the surviving middle tier needs to be evaluated against actual traffic data, not assumptions.

The ranking changes we cannot attribute cleanly

Overall organic clicks were up 34% year-on-year at month eight. I would love to tell you this was all the directory work, but Google rolled out two core updates in that window, the firm published four new service pages I had drafted, and a competitor in the next town shut down. Any of these could account for some of the lift. My honest read is that the directory and citation work probably contributed somewhere between a quarter and a half of the gain, with on-site content doing most of the rest.

I would rather give you that messy answer than a clean attribution chart that pretends to a precision I do not have.

Adjusting the playbook for different scenarios

The framework I used for the law firm was shaped by their specific situation: a stable local services business with a long history, a moderate budget, and no time pressure. Change those constraints and the playbook changes substantially.

If this were a SaaS company instead

For a SaaS business, the local citation work is almost irrelevant. What replaces it is product-discovery directories: Product Hunt, G2, Capterra, AlternativeTo, GetApp, and the dozens of niche SaaS aggregators that have proliferated since 2020. These behave like directories in structural terms but function much more like review platforms and comparison sites. The Launch Directories piece I cited earlier is essentially about this category, and their framing of listings as discovery touchpoints is more accurate for SaaS than for local services.

I would also weight industry-specific directories much more heavily for SaaS. A B2B project management tool that gets into the right curated stack for a vertical (legal tech, construction, healthcare) can see ten or twenty times the referral traffic from one well-placed listing that it sees from a hundred generic SaaS lists.

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> Inherited
  Inherited --> Triaged : run four-question filter
  Triaged --> Keep : scores 3 or 4
  Triaged --> Review : scores 2
  Triaged --> Remove : scores 0 or 1
  Review --> Keep : update listing
  Review --> Remove : still no value
  Remove --> Disavowed : active link network
  Keep --> [*]
  Disavowed --> [*]

Working with a $500 monthly budget

If the law firm had given me $500 a month rather than the larger engagement, I would have done less and done it manually. Three months of GBP optimisation, NAP cleanup, and the top fifteen UK citation sources would have absorbed most of the budget. I would have skipped the disavow file (controversial, but at that budget you cannot afford the time it takes), skipped any paid placements, and focused entirely on the foundational local citation tier.

The order of operations matters when money is tight. Fix what is already broken before you add anything new. A correctly configured GBP outperforms thirty new directory submissions for a local business, every single time.

When a six-week timeline forces shortcuts

I have had clients turn up needing visible results in six weeks, often because of an upcoming funding round or a seasonal sales window. The directory playbook in that scenario is brutal and narrow. Two weeks for GBP and the top citation sources. Two weeks for the single highest-impact industry-specific placement (which, for many sectors, is a paid one with a fast turnaround). Two weeks for reporting and minor iteration. No audit of historic listings; that work cannot deliver results inside the window and will distract from the things that can.

It is not a good engagement to take on, but if you must, narrow the scope ruthlessly. Telling a client what you will not do is often more useful than the work you will do.

Transferable principles

If you take nothing else from this walkthrough, take these. Directory submission as a volume game ended around 2013 and is not coming back. Directory submission as a curated, deliberate practice of getting your business onto the lists your potential customers and the search engines actually consult, that is alive and well and worth doing carefully.

Audit before you add. Most businesses with any SEO history at all have a buried inheritance of bad listings that needs cleanup before new work makes sense. Treat citation directories and link directories as different products with different evaluation criteria. Pay for placements that are gated by editorial review, decline placements that are gated only by your credit card. Update existing listings before you create new ones; the existing ones already have whatever authority they are going to accumulate, and inaccurate data is worse than no data.

And measure what you can, admit what you cannot. The eight-month results for the law firm were good, but I cannot tell you which exact intervention produced which exact gain, and any consultant who claims that level of attribution on a project like this is selling you a story.

A note on the directories themselves

One thing I have not addressed directly: a lot of directory websites are themselves struggling. Turnkey Directories reports that most new directory websites fail within their first year, and the survivors are increasingly specialised, niche, or hyperlocal. This matters for submission strategy because the general-purpose business directory of 2008 is largely extinct or zombified. The directories that work in 2025 are the ones that solved a real discovery problem for users, and you can usually spot those because real users review them, real users link to them, and real users return to them.

If you are looking at a directory and cannot imagine a non-business-owner ever using it voluntarily, that is your answer. Submission is not the point. Being on lists people read is the point.

What I would do differently next time

Two things, in honesty. First, I would start the GBP and citation cleanup in week one rather than waiting until the audit was complete. The audit work could have run in parallel, and the citation fixes would have been delivering results a month earlier. I think I prioritised “understand before you act” too strictly. Some of the local citation hygiene is so reliably useful that you can start it on day one.

Second, I would set up referral-traffic tracking before the engagement begins, not as part of it. I lost some baseline data because I started tracking referral sources properly only in month two, which made the eight-month comparison less clean than I wanted. If you take on this kind of work, build the measurement scaffolding in week zero.

If you are sitting on an inherited backlink profile right now and wondering whether to touch it, here is my concrete recommendation: pull the full backlink list this week, sort by domain, and spend two hours flagging the obvious junk. You will not finish the audit, but you will know within those two hours whether you have a small problem or a large one. That single step will tell you more about your next month of SEO work than any keyword research will.