When taking your business online, one of the mandatory steps every marketer recommends is setting up small business listings. Adding your business to local business directories will help SEO and make your business readily accessible to potential customers. With well-planned small business listings, you can target the local customers and rank higher in the search results. 

Now that we have established that small business listings are essential for effective marketing strategy, you will have to look into the details. Business listings come in two types – free business listings and paid business listings. For a business owner who is new to the online marketing platform, this might get confusing, and thus we are here to explain it to you. Look through the pros and cons of both types and decide on the one that will be the best choice for your business.

---

Read Also: Why Is It Important to Add Your Business to Local Directories?

---

Free Business Listing

Free business directories are prevalent and are the ones that are most preferred by people who are new to the online platform and by those who are starting their business from scratch. Here are some of the pros and cons of having a free business listing.

Pros

1. It Is Free: People who are starting a business might have a tight financial situation. Free business listings help you rank better without spending money separately for marketing. 

2. Easy to Set-Up: Free small business listings only require basic information like business address, phone number, email address, and such. You can easily set them up without anyone’s help. Businesses with single employees can profit a great deal with free business listings. 

3. Added Visibility: Having small business listings help a great deal with SEO, and with the right strategy, you can rank higher. Added visibility to potential customers can mean increased leads and eventually increased revenue.

Cons

1. It Is Free: This might seem like a contradiction, but it is a reality. Free business listings attract more business owners, and sofree directories are often swamped with listings. When you go with free business listings, your business becomes a needle in the haystack. 
2. Spammers: Most free business directories use settings that accept automatic submissions of business listings. This means that the free business directories might have spambot-created accounts unless the said directory vets each listing daily.  
3. Reputation: Most free business directories have a cheap and unreliable look since they operate on limited funds. They might also be riddled with low-quality links and ads. Thus, before you choose a free business directory, make sure to check its reputation in the online community.

Paid Business Listing

If you want to take your business to the next level and believe that you have something unique to offer the customers, then a paid business listing is the right choice. Look through the pros and cons of the paid small business listings before you make the decision.

Pros

1. More Features: While free business listings have provisions to enter your business details, it is limited to basic information like address and phone number. But with paid business listings, you get to add more features like your social media links, custom contact forms, and many more.
   For example, LocalBizNetwork offers the provision to add an unlimited number of articles, custom videos, and more with a paid business listing. With this, your visitors get more content to be convinced on why they should choose you.  

2. Better Reliability: With increased content, you provide about your product/service, the customer’s trust in your business grows. This is excellent news for SERPs and SEO. With increased reliability comes an increase in the number of customers and better revenue.  

3. Less Spam: People tend to be thorough on things they pay for. Thus, the business listings you find on paid business directories are often authentic, and spambot-created accounts are scarce.  

4. Reputation: Authentic business listings lead to better performance. This usually makes the paid business directories more reliable with higher SEO rankings and higher approval ratings. Having a small business listing in these authoritative directories helps your business fare better.

Cons

1. More Time to Create Listing: The increased number of features in paid business listings require more of your time to setup the listing. Thus, taking some time to update information in your listing regularly becomes an added responsibility. Maintaining the listing is also an essential factor for staying on top of the marketing game. 

2. It Is Not Free: Paid business listings will require an added budget. But if you compare it to the cost of building and maintaining a website, paid business listings are far more practical. 
   For example, creating a website from scratch and maintenance costs can reach up to $1000 or more depending on your design. But at LocalBizNetwork, we offer paid business listings at just $9.99 per month. The difference is noticeable!

LocalBizNetwork

LocalBizNetwork LLC was formed in 1999, and for over 20+ years, we have been helping small business owners gain credibility and better visibility in the online marketing platform. To know more about the plans offered by us, give us a visit at https://www.localbiznetwork.com/add-biz.php.