How do I get my business listed in online directories?

Directory listings are not about customers browsing directories. Hardly anyone does that any more. They are about corroboration: Google, Bing, Apple and the assistants that sit on top of them compare the details they find about you across the web, and a handful of consistent entries on recognised sites tells them you are real and where you say you are.

That word consistent is the whole game. If every listing says the same name and the same phone number, each one reinforces the others. If they do not — "Kate's Mobile Hairdressing" here, "Kate Smith Hair" there, an old mobile on a listing you set up in 2019 and forgot — the signals argue with each other, and the wrong one is the one somebody might ring. It also means more is not better: ten accurate listings on sites people have heard of beat a hundred on sites they have not, and the hundred are a liability, because you will never keep them up to date.

Which directories should a UK business actually be listed in?

About a dozen, and most of them are free. The table below is every listing a UK local service business realistically meets, with its position as published on the company's own site on 15 September 2026. Directories change their models often, so each row says where the answer came from rather than what everyone repeats.

Read the table twice and the shape of the job becomes obvious. Nine of the fourteen cost nothing. The five that charge are all lead-generation services, and none of them is a visibility decision.

Write your details down once, before you create any account

One note, seven lines, and every listing afterwards is a copy-and-paste job. This is the step that decides whether the next two hours help you or quietly create the mess you spend three years untangling.

• Business name — exactly as it appears on your website, van and invoices. Not "Ltd" on one site and nothing on another.
• Phone number — one number, one format. 01793 123456 everywhere, not 01793123456 on one site and +44 1793 123456 on the next.
• Address or service areas — your premises, or the towns you cover if you work from home.
• Website — copied from the browser bar, so you get the right version of the address.
• Email — the business one, not an account nobody can get into any more.
• Opening hours — including what you really do about weekends and emergencies.
• Description — two or three plain sentences naming your main services and the areas you cover, written the same way you write them on your service pages.

From here on, never retype your details from memory. Retyping is how the inconsistencies get in.

The three that matter most: Google, Bing and Apple

These three are free, take about an hour between them, and matter more than every other directory combined, because they feed the maps and assistants people actually use.

Google Business Profile

This is the one to do if you only ever do one. Google's help page is unambiguous that "you can add or claim your business at no charge", either at business.google.com/add or by finding yourself on Google Maps and choosing "Claim this business". Either route ends in a verification step, which is the part that takes the time. There is a full walkthrough in how to set up your Google Business Profile, and an answer to the question people keep asking in what a Google Business Profile costs.

Bing Places

Bing Places is free and it will import your Google profile, which makes it close to a ten-minute job. Microsoft's own announcement describes it as "a free online platform where businesses can create and manage their listings to appear in Bing search results and Bing Maps", and says it has "made major improvements to how business owners import listings from Google".

The one thing to know is that the address changed: bingplaces.com now redirects to bing.com/forbusiness. Sign in with a Microsoft account, choose the Google import, then read the imported details rather than trusting them. Bing is also where you will find Bing Webmaster Tools, a different product doing a different job on your website, and worth having too.

Apple Business, which used to be Apple Business Connect

Apple Business Connect no longer exists. Apple announced in March 2026 that "Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches", and Apple Business launched on 14 April 2026 as a free service in more than 200 countries and regions, with existing data transferring across automatically.

If you set up an Apple Business Connect listing before then, it moved with you and nothing is lost. If you have not done Apple at all, go to business.apple.com, sign in with an Apple Account and claim your location. Apple describes the listing as something you "customize with photos, detailed location information, hours, and other useful details that display across Apple Maps, Safari, Spotlight, and more". Plenty of small businesses have never bothered, which makes it the easiest gap to close.

Are the free general directories, like Yell, still worth doing?

Yes, but for about fifteen minutes each, and with your expectations set right: they corroborate your details, they are not a source of work.

Yell still offers a free business profile, and its own page says your details are shared with "Apple, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft and other syndicated partners", subject to eligibility and network restrictions. That syndication is the real reason to do it, and the reason a wrong Yell entry is worth fixing rather than ignoring. Be ready for a sales approach: the form asks for your employee numbers and annual turnover, which tells you what happens next. You are not obliged to buy anything.

Thomson Local has a catch worth knowing first. Its free listing is described on its own product page as "a three-month time limited free business listing", live in as little as 48 hours. Three months, then presumably a conversation about a paid one. Do it if you like, but diarise it, and do not count it as permanent.

Yelp is free to claim — "It's free to be on Yelp", in its own words — and its business site claims more than 74 million visitors a month and that 82 per cent of users hire or buy from a business they found there. Those are Yelp's own global figures, not independent UK ones. Claim the page and correct the details anyway, because an unclaimed, inaccurate Yelp page outlives you. Yelp Ads is a separate advertising decision.

FreeIndex invites businesses to "advertise for FREE", carries more than 450,000 UK business reviews by its own count, and sells a Premium tier on top. Nextdoor is the one most often missed: its UK business centre says to "get started by creating a FREE business page", and claims over 10 million UK users and that one in four UK households is on Nextdoor. For a tradesperson, a free page on the site where neighbours swap recommendations is a sensible half hour. A Facebook Page costs nothing and is still one of the first places a customer checks before ringing.

Are Checkatrade and the trade sites directories or advertising?

Advertising, and it is not close: every one of them charges, and what you buy is leads rather than listings. Judge them on jobs won per pound, the way you would judge a van livery, not on whether they "help you get found". What each publishes on its own site, checked 15 September 2026:

• MyBuilder is the most transparent. No joining or membership fees, and shortlist fees that typically range from £2 to £35 depending on the size of the job, charged when contact details are exchanged — whether or not you win the work.
• Which? Trusted Traders publishes a full fee table: a £248 assessment fee including VAT, then £66 a month or £797 a year including VAT for up to three employees, £86 or £1,029 for four to nine, £114 or £1,363 for ten to nineteen. The assessment involves credit checks, customer references and a meeting with a trading standards professional.
• Rated People sells a flat monthly plan covering jobs up to £4,000 within 50 miles, but does not publish the price; you get it by ringing 0333 212 0182.
• TrustATrader says there is no commission and you never pay for leads, and limits memberships per area, but publishes no membership price.
• Checkatrade publishes no price list at all. Membership is a 12-month term quoted on your trade, postcodes and lead volume. The separate guide on what Checkatrade costs sets out what is and is not published, including the £250 excluding VAT application fee in its master service terms.

Do the arithmetic before you sign. A £66 monthly fee against a £600 average job needs roughly one extra job every nine months to break even. A £15 lead converting one time in ten is a £150 cost of sale: fine on a £2,000 job, ruinous on a £200 one. Read the exit terms too, because minimum terms and notice periods are where the surprises live.

What is NAP consistency, without the jargon?

NAP is name, address, phone number, and consistency means writing all three exactly the same way everywhere. That is the whole concept. It has an acronym because the industry got tired of typing it out, not because it is complicated.

Search engines have no certificate proving your business exists. They have a lot of mentions of you scattered across the web, and a job to work out which describe the same real business. Identical details make that easy. Three spellings of your name and two phone numbers make it a guess.

The consequences are more mundane than the theory. A customer finds an eight-year-old listing with the mobile you stopped using. A map pin still sits at the unit you left in 2023. A review lands on a duplicate profile you cannot see. None is a ranking catastrophe; each loses you the job in front of you.

How do I audit my own listings for free?

In about forty minutes, with a browser and a spreadsheet. You do not need a paid tool, and the paid tools are mostly automating searches you can run yourself.

• Search the details, not the business. Put your phone number in quotation marks into Google, then Bing. Then your address. Then each version of your business name, including any trading name used before a rename.
• Search the old details too. The previous number, the previous address, a maiden name, the name of the business you bought. This is where the damaging entries hide.
• Check the maps directly. Look up your address on Google Maps and on Apple Maps. A dead pin at an old unit often survives a move by years because nobody told either of them.
• Log every listing in a spreadsheet: site, URL, the name, number and address it shows, whether you can log in, and what needs changing. That sheet is the deliverable. Next time your number changes, you will know exactly where to go.
• Ask an assistant. Type "what is the phone number for [your business] in [your town]" into ChatGPT and Copilot. A rough check rather than a measurement, but it occasionally surfaces a wrong number you would never have found.

How do I get a wrong or duplicate listing corrected?

Claim it first, then edit it. Most directories offer some version of "is this your business?" and verify you by email, phone or post before letting you change anything; the big three have a defined route for each case.

Google. Its help on duplicate profiles splits this in two. If both profiles are in your account, you remove the duplicate and the verified one is unaffected. If you do not own the duplicate, you report a suggestion on Google Maps asking for the two to be merged. Google reviews every request, and warns that when profiles are merged "their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost", so save your replies first.

Bing. Claim the listing through bing.com/forbusiness and edit it there; if it came in through the Google import, correcting the Google profile first saves doing it twice.

Apple. Claim the place in Apple Business. Anyone can also report a problem with a place from inside the Maps app, which is the quickest fix for a wrong pin you cannot claim.

Yell, Yelp, Thomson Local and the rest. Look for "claim this listing" or "is this your business", verify, correct. If a directory you have never heard of will not let you fix an entry, leave it and put the effort where the traffic is. Prioritise wrong phone numbers above everything else: a customer ringing a dead number is worse than not finding you at all, because they conclude you have gone.

Are "we'll submit you to 500 directories" services worth paying for?

No, because volume is the wrong thing to buy, and Google says so in its own words. Its spam policies list "low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as an example of link spam. Hundreds of entries on sites nobody visits are not an asset, they are a maintenance burden you cannot service.

Not all of them are junk, though. The legitimate end is citation building: a firm manually submits your name, address and phone number to a list of directories and data aggregators, then sends you a report with the logins. BrightLocal's citation builder advertises submissions "from $2/citation" as a one-off charge across more than a thousand directories and niche sites, with data aggregator networks at $30 each. That is real work by people, priced in US dollars because the market is American.

But notice what the sellers say when they are being careful. Thomson Local's own citation product describes focusing on "quality over quantity to secure your place on the 15 most high-value citation websites available in the UK", naming 192.com, Foursquare, Cylex-UK and Google. Fifteen, from a company selling the service. That is the honest number, and you can work through it yourself in an afternoon.

Walk away from the cold callers: the ones ringing about "claiming your listing before it is deleted", the ones promising the first page of Google, the ones charging monthly to keep an entry live on a directory with no visitors. If a directory has to phone you to get listings, it has no audience.

Do directories affect what AI assistants say about my business?

They can, and the honest version is narrower than the version you will be sold. Nobody outside the AI companies knows which sources an assistant used for a given answer, and anyone offering to get you "listed in ChatGPT" is selling something that does not exist.

What is on the record is the plumbing. Apple says the details you manage in Apple Business "display across Apple Maps, Safari, Spotlight, and more". Microsoft says Bing Places listings appear in Bing search results and Bing Maps, and names "deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot" as still to come rather than already done. Yell says a free profile is syndicated to Apple, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft.

So the risk states itself without exaggeration: a wrong phone number in a syndicated listing does not stay in that listing. It travels into the places assistants read, and can come back out as an answer given to a customer who will never know it was wrong. Reason enough for the forty-minute audit above. For the wider picture, see how to get your business on ChatGPT.

What should I do first if I have only an hour?

Three things, in this order, and they get you most of the available benefit. Write the master note. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. Then import it into Bing Places, which takes minutes once Google exists. If the hour stretches, add Apple Business, because it is quick and most of your competitors have not done it.

Everything else — Yell, Yelp, Nextdoor, Facebook, FreeIndex, Thomson Local — can wait, and is better done three at a time over a fortnight than all at once. There is no prize for finishing in a day and a real cost to typing your number three different ways. Afterwards, check whether any of it turns into enquiries by setting up conversion tracking.

Common questions

Are business directories worth it?

The free ones are worth the hour they take, for a reason that has nothing to do with people browsing them. Google, Bing and Apple all run their own business listing platforms at no charge, and those three feed the maps and search results customers actually use. General directories such as Yell and Yelp are worth a free listing because they corroborate your details. Paid directory listings are an advertising decision and should be judged on jobs won, not on visibility.

Is a free Yell listing worth it?

Yes, for about fifteen minutes of your time. Yell's free business profile costs nothing and Yell says the details are shared with Apple, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft and other syndicated partners, subject to eligibility and network restrictions, so one accurate entry can travel. Expect sales contact afterwards: the sign-up form asks for your employee numbers and annual turnover. You do not have to buy anything to keep the free profile.

Is Yelp worth it for a small business in the UK?

The free page is worth claiming; the advertising is a separate decision. Yelp's own business site says it is free to be on Yelp, and claims 74 million or more visitors a month and that 82 per cent of users hire or buy from a business they found there. Those are global figures published by Yelp, not independent UK ones. Claim the page, fix the details, and treat Yelp Ads as advertising to be judged on results.

What is NAP consistency?

NAP stands for name, address and phone number, and consistency means writing all three the same way everywhere they appear. Search engines compare the details they find across sites to work out whether listings describe one real business. Ten listings saying the same thing reinforce each other. Ten listings with three spellings of your name and two phone numbers do not, and the old wrong number is the one a customer may ring.

How do I remove a duplicate Google Business Profile listing?

It depends on whether you own the duplicate. Google's help says that if both profiles are in your account you remove the duplicate without affecting the verified one. If you do not own it, you report a suggestion on Google Maps asking for the profiles to be merged. Google reviews every request, and warns that when profiles are merged the reviews are combined but replies to reviews may be lost.

How do I get my business on Apple Maps now that Apple Business Connect has gone?

Through Apple Business, which replaced it. Apple announced in March 2026 that Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager and Apple Business Connect would no longer be available once Apple Business launched, which it did on 14 April 2026 as a free service in more than 200 countries and regions. Existing data transferred automatically. businessconnect.apple.com now redirects to business.apple.com, where you claim your location and add photos, hours and other details.

Are services that submit your business to 500 directories worth paying for?

Volume is the wrong thing to buy. Google's own spam policies list low-quality directory or bookmark site links as an example of link spam, so hundreds of obscure entries are not a ranking asset. Even the firms that sell citation building do not really sell volume: Thomson Local's citation service says it focuses on quality over quantity and targets the 15 highest-value UK citation sites. You can do the ones that matter yourself.

How do I find old listings I have forgotten about?

Search for the details rather than the business. Put your old phone number in quotation marks into Google and Bing, then your old address, then each spelling of your business name you have ever used, including any trading name from before a rename. Old listings surface because they still carry the old detail. Check Google Maps and Apple Maps by address as well, since a dead pin often survives a move.

Sources, all checked 15 September 2026. Google Business Profile Help, "Add your business profile to Google" ("You can add or claim your business at no charge"; business.google.com/add; claim via Google Maps). Google Business Profile Help, "Resolve duplicate profiles and ownership issues" (remove a duplicate you own; report a suggestion on Google Maps for one you do not; "their reviews are combined, but replies to reviews may be lost"). Google Search Central, spam policies ("Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" as an example of link spam). Bing Search Blog, "Introducing the New Bing Places for Business", October 2025 ("a free online platform where businesses can create and manage their listings to appear in Bing search results and Bing Maps"; improved import from Google; "deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot" listed as still to come); bingplaces.com observed returning a 301 redirect to bing.com/forbusiness. Apple Newsroom, "Introducing Apple Business", March 2026 ("Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect will no longer be available once Apple Business launches"; free service; "Starting April 14"; more than 200 countries and regions; details "display across Apple Maps, Safari, Spotlight, and more"); businessconnect.apple.com observed redirecting to business.apple.com. Yell's free business profile pages at yell.com and business.yell.com (free profile; details shared with "Apple, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft and other syndicated partners", subject to eligibility and network restrictions; sign-up form requesting employee numbers and annual turnover). Thomson Local product pages (free listing described as "a three-month time limited free business listing", live in as little as 48 hours; Get Me Everywhere Plus citation service, "quality over quantity", "the 15 most high-value citation websites available in the UK", naming 192.com, Foursquare, Cylex-UK and Google). Yelp for Business, biz.yelp.co.uk ("It's free to be on Yelp"; "74+ million people visit Yelp each month"; "82% of users hire or buy from a business they found on Yelp" — Yelp's own global figures). Nextdoor Business Centre UK, business.nextdoor.com/en-gb ("Get started by creating a FREE business page"; "Over 10 million neighbours on Nextdoor in the UK"; "1 in 4 UK households are on Nextdoor" — Nextdoor's own figures). FreeIndex homepage ("Advertise for FREE on FreeIndex"; "450,000+ local business reviews"; FreeIndex Premium). MyBuilder trade registration and tradesperson terms (no joining or membership fees; shortlist fees typically £2 to £35, charged when contact details are exchanged, win or lose). Which? Trusted Traders join site, for-traders.which.co.uk (£248 inc VAT assessment fee; £66 monthly or £797 annually inc VAT for 0–3 employees, £86 or £1,029 for 4–9, £114 or £1,363 for 10–19; credit checks, references and a meeting with a trading standards professional). Rated People tradespeople pages (flat monthly plan, jobs up to £4,000, within 50 miles, price by phone on 0333 212 0182). TrustATrader join pages (no commission, never pay for leads, memberships limited per area). Checkatrade join site, master service terms and product terms (12-month term, price quoted on trade, postcodes and lead volume; Application Fee of £250 excluding VAT; the free profile service). BrightLocal Citation Builder ("from $2/citation", one-off charge, 1,000+ directories and niche sites, data aggregator networks at $30 each; US dollars). Could not be established, and deliberately not estimated: Meta's own help pages could not be retrieved on the day of checking, so the statement that a Facebook Page is free to create rests on the sign-up process rather than a quoted Meta source; Checkatrade's, Rated People's and TrustATrader's membership prices, which none of them publishes; how many enquiries any free listing produces, for which there is no published UK figure; and which specific sources any AI assistant used for a given answer, which no AI company discloses. Questions and headings were drawn from 1,824 unique Google UK autocomplete suggestions returned by 496 seeded queries in September 2026.