Do Irish Businesses Advertise in Web Directories?

WillRoyal

I wonder on the uptake of paid Advertisements on Web Directories? Does the Free Listing/ Premium listing Directory set up really work or is there another way of charging? If you wanted to set up a Local Directory how would you make it stand out and more appealing to Businesses??

Very interested in idea's on this?

smash

I worked on a local directory system for someone in the past. I knew it wasn't going to work but the client was insistent that his idea was amazing. I'm just glad I got paid before he went bust.

WillRoyal

From what i am reading Web Direcories work very well in other countries but for some reason there are dead unused Directories all over Ireland, only very few survive. There are always lots of free Ads taken out but very few Paid Ads..

smash

Each industry has it's top player in the online directories game. As a result, the likes of golden pages or yourlocal don't really hold a position in the market any more.

pedronomix

Google basically own the internet, who would bother with a business or telephone directory?

adamrooney

WillRoyal wrote: »

I wonder on the uptake of paid Advertisements on Web Directories? Does the Free Listing/ Premium listing Directory set up really work or is there another way of charging? If you wanted to set up a Local Directory how would you make it stand out and more appealing to Businesses??

Very interested in idea's on this?

My advice to you would be to stay away from it unless you have significant capital to invest in it. Even at that I would be very reluctant to do it. I was involved in one and it just wasn't worth it. As Ireland is such a small country both by population and geography there is so much competition in the market and less of a need/dependence on a directory when compared to other countries.

The people involved in our project were all very skilled but it just kept needing more and more capital investment to compete, when in truth many Irish people/businesses are very hesitant to pay for a listing - and you can understand that as there are so many free resources out there.

jmcc

WillRoyal wrote: »

I wonder on the uptake of paid Advertisements on Web Directories? Does the Free Listing/ Premium listing Directory set up really work or is there another way of charging? If you wanted to set up a Local Directory how would you make it stand out and more appealing to Businesses??

Very interested in idea's on this?

It is a hell of a lot more complex than most web developers even realise. One simple question is the killer: how do you keep it updated?

Regards...jmcc

dbran

Why would anyone use your directory when all they have to do is google it.

And then, why would a business want to pay for a listing instead of SEO or Google ads.

Just cant see it working out.

dbran

WillRoyal

I think trust is a big issue with web Directories. if you can build trust within the community or Locality the Directory is based you could potentially create a place of reference that Local people will flock for Local Businesses of the Niche you choose.

pedronomix

WillRoyal wrote: »

I think trust is a big issue with web Directories. if you can build trust within the community or Locality the Directory is based you could potentially create a place of reference that Local people will flock for Local Businesses of the Niche you choose.

If it is not comprehensive and up to date, nobody will value it and many businesses will simply not pay to be listed. Users always want it for free. The ultimate catch 22

smash

WillRoyal wrote: »

I think trust is a big issue with web Directories. if you can build trust within the community or Locality the Directory is based you could potentially create a place of reference that Local people will flock for Local Businesses of the Niche you choose.

A business will not pay for something, nor will they update something that has no traffic, and traffic takes time to build up. Also, these days users will look for the best deal, not the local guy.

WillRoyal

If you had the traffic, where there the Best Deal, and was the Local Guy this could be a winning combination i think although this would all take a long time to build up. Particularly trust as the local guy and Web Traffic

delahuntv

Here's the questions you need to ask -

Have you ever used an online web directory?
Do any friends or family use an online web directory?


I would reckon you'll be hard pressed to find someone that does as google search is simply far too good.


Now, if it was highly specialised and targeted a specific market, it may be different.

adamrooney

WillRoyal wrote: »

If you had the traffic, where there the Best Deal, and was the Local Guy this could be a winning combination i think although this would all take a long time to build up. Particularly trust as the local guy and Web Traffic

To get the traffic to the site is the big thing though. You will need serious capital investment to do this and then capital for offline factors (believe me they will arise). The CPC is high in the whole 'directory/daily deal' niche so you will need a serious Adwords budget (if you decide to use Google). While there are other search engines for PPC, when we tried it for this niche the CPE wasn't great.

Even if you don't want to do PPC and decide to go down the organic ranking route, it will again take you months, likely much longer, to get your website any kind of rankings in the SERP. You will also need whatever businesses have registered to be ranking high - credibility factor. You literally have to have several different online campaigns running at the same time. And there is still a large cost to getting the organic ranking - that certainly won't come free as the competition is fierce.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was involved in something similar, but we just didn't realise the scale of investment that was needed when we first started. I would love to see you succeed with it as I think I know what your trying to do, but my advice would be to stay away unless you have serious capital behind you, and even then I would advise against because of other factors as mentioned by other people on this thread.

Atomico

WillRoyal wrote: »

I wonder on the uptake of paid Advertisements on Web Directories? Does the Free Listing/ Premium listing Directory set up really work or is there another way of charging? If you wanted to set up a Local Directory how would you make it stand out and more appealing to Businesses??

Very interested in idea's on this?

Google own web search (in most countries anyway), and why would you take two steps to find something (search then click onto a site) when you can find it in one (a quick google)?

Google are even getting smarter at this, you can even get the opening hours for some businesses with a simple search, without having to even scroll down to the listings.

jmcc

WillRoyal wrote: »

I think trust is a big issue with web Directories. if you can build trust within the community or Locality the Directory is based you could potentially create a place of reference that Local people will flock for Local Businesses of the Niche you choose.

I don't think so. The big issue with web directories is content. This has always been so. Covering a small area is easy and it is probably just a small set of local websites (<100). When you go beyond that, it becomes difficult for the average web developer to detect new websites. The usual approach is to have someone trawl Google looking for new sites. However that's no longer a good approach as Google's search quality and relevance is getting poorer. Websites no longer link to each other at the rates that they used to link.

Then there is the issue of attrition. This is where websites disappear and domain names drop. It affects all web directories. Thousands of Irish domain names drop or are deleted each month. Thousands are registered. Most people think of the set of Irish domain names being relatively static. It is not. The Irish hosted domain market grew from approximately 368K domains last September to 373K domains on 01 September 2014. However approximately 74K of those were new domains or domains gained from non-Irish hosters.

The first generation of directories were overtaken by search engines because they solved some of the attrition problem by keeping their data fresh by crawling. However the operational lifetime of a web directory in the Irish market tends to be around 18 months. Going local only results in taking a small slice of a small market.

Regards...jmcc

tricky D

Used to collate a general Irish directory in the early days, but stopped in 97 as it was clear that search engines would take over the space for many of the reasons jmcc describes and the fact that it was hard to monetise. Then went on to a holiday, leisure and golf one for a short while longer until the signs of the bottom falling out of the market arrived. Nowadays, it is just about possible to have a niche directory but it needs a good few key variables to be just right. Eg. whatclinic.com is an international medical practitioner directory which needed a huge amount of investment, spent loads of resources on SEO and various ad models and hardest of all it actually managed to get into the middleman space for transactions which web-wise is somewhat counter-intuitive. However, I'd reckon it's now under even greater threat from search engines, specifically Google with its 7-pack local listings and Knowledge Graph method which Atomico referes to, which cater for even more revenue killing directory-bypassing.

jmcc

tricky D wrote: »

However, I'd reckon it's now under even greater threat from search engines, specifically Google with its 7-pack local listings and Knowledge Graph method which Atomico referes to, which cater for even more revenue killing directory-bypassing.

Just downloaded the Dmoz RDF files and parsed them. There are only 9,680 sites listed in the Ireland category. Some categories have been updated recently. The problem with Dmoz, apart from the fire and forget nature of link additions is that its structure for Ireland sucks. It suffers from the brainfart directory structure. Getting the structure (ontology) of a directory right is a difficult thing and the first reaction of people who don't understand what they are doing is to try to create pages/topics for everything. Good designs don't do this. They concentrate sites under easily understood topics. (There are some interesting, if technical, academic papers on the subject. ( http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1302/1302.2222.pdf ). )

Getting back to the Dmoz Ireland thing, a brief look at the categories shows that some of them have few links. This is due to the "localities" problem where a some Dmoz editors decided it would be good to fragment each city/town/region into localities. This effective spreads a small number of sites over a large number of webpages. It is not good and leads to the impression that there is little or no content in the directory. It was a bad move.

The Google "knowledge" graph is sheer plagiarism by people who never really created any websites of worth. It seemed that it was initially targeted at Facebook and its Social Network when Facebook was launching on the stock market. Now it is little more than a crass attempt to keep searchers on Google SERPs so that they can be subjected to more advertising. The rise of Wikipedia screwed Google as a "universal" search engine. Almost a generation of school kids and students has grown up using Wikipedia as a reference site. it has supplanted Google as a go-to resource. A local directory would have to similarly remove Google as the primary go-to site. One of the best ways to do this would be to build a community around the site. Google's weakness is that it is full of dorks when it comes to Social Media. Thus they try to imitate the market leaders and fail (Wave/Buzz/Google Plus etc). A local directory should have something that Google cannot replicate - local knowledge.

Regards...jmcc

Royallyon

Way too much competition in the marketplace and not enough demand for it. In my opinion, I'd stay away from it.