Local business

Local business directories

Restaurants, shops, garages, clinics: the oldest kind of directory and still the one with the most searches behind it. It is also the one that rots fastest, because the facts it holds change without telling you.

  • High search intent
  • Local competition
  • Ages quickly

What a listing has to carry

A local listing is a set of claims about a physical place. Each one has to be checkable, because each one will be wrong eventually.

  • Categoryenum
  • Neighbourhood or districtstring
  • Wheelchair accessibleboolean
  • Payment methods acceptedmultiEnum
  • Websiteurl

Where the difficulty sits

The data expires
A restaurant changes its hours, a shop moves, a garage stops taking a brand. Nothing tells you. A local directory is judged on the entry someone acted on, so a single stale listing costs more trust than ten good ones earn.
You are competing with a map
The incumbent already has every address. You do not win on coverage, you win on a question the map cannot answer: which of these has a quiet room, takes cash, opens on Sunday, fixes this specific thing.
Depth beats breadth
One district covered exhaustively, with fields nobody else records, is worth more than a whole city covered thinly. It also gives you something to sell: local businesses understand paying for position in their own neighbourhood.

How to start this one

  1. Pick one district and one category

    Not a city, and not everything in it. A directory of every bakery in one part of town can be complete on day one, and complete is what makes people link to it.

  2. Add the field the map does not have

    Decide the one thing you will record that nobody else does, and record it for every entry without exception. That field is your entire reason to exist.

  3. Set a re-check rhythm before you grow

    Decide how often each listing is revisited, then expand only as fast as you can hold that promise. Coverage you cannot keep current is a liability.

Describe this niche in your chat

The agent proposes a field structure before it writes a single listing. If it has misread the niche, you will see it immediately and can say so.

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