Yellow pages Directory websites are one of the very useful forms of online directories.
If you are planning to create your own Yellow pages directory website but confused where to start, here’s a complete guide on how you can create a business directory yellow pages website with WordPress.
The best thing about using the WordPress for Yellow Pages Directory is that it makes the task of creating web directory easier and effortless.
All you need to do is to follow 5 simple steps mentioned below and start earning with your online directory in minutes:
- Get the domain name and hosting for your yellow page script
- Install the WordPress Yellow pages directory software
- Customizing your yellow pages directory as per your requirements
- Adding listings on your Yellow pages directory
- Monetizing your yellow pages online directories
- Promoting your online directory
- Maintaining your yellow pages directory website
Get Domain name and hosting service
A directory website is different for normal websites like business or online portfolio websites. Yelp-style Directory websites are a large website with large data submitted by various users.
Also, the domain name and the hosting are long-term decisions. You can definitely move your WordPress site to a new domain or host, but that’s a little complicated. The better idea is to think about the domain name and hosting thoroughly in the first place.
Register the domain name
To register the domain, you can rely on popular domain registrars like BlueHost. You can choose the domain name based on your website’s purpose.
The following are some quick guidelines for an ideal domain name:
- Keep it short and simple
- Try to include your main keywords
- Choose a name that is easy to spell and remember. (As we don’t want to lost traffic because of misspelled domain names)
I’ll go for BlueHost for my domain name registration. To do so, I will navigate to the domain section of their website and enter my desired domain name to see if it’s available.
As domain names are unique, you will have to choose a new one if the one you want to check out for is already taken. It is advisable that when you are deciding the domain name, you should keep a list of alternative domain names ready with you. So that when you try to register a domain name, you can quickly try one after the another and check out for the one that is available.
Register the hosting service for your Yellow pages directory website
Once we have the domain name ready, now we’ll head to subscribe to the hosting service.
Now there are plenty of hosts available in the market. You can choose the one that suits you the best. But how will you know what host is best for you?
For a yellow pages directory website, we need a hosting service that is reliable, has a good up-time, secure and faster response. I’ll go for the Bluehost WordPress optimized hosting, as it is designed especially for WordPress websites.
Signup now to get our discount – only $2.95/month.
Templatic Themes fans get a special low price when hosting with Bluehost. Signup and claim this deal.
You can choose from the available plans. I recommend going for the prime plan, where you get a free SSL, and some backup features. However, you can choose any of their plans and it’ll work just as fine.
So when you’ve chosen the payment package, you can proceed to checkout. When you successfully pay for the service, a mail will be sent to you with your login details.
Starting with your Yellow pages directory
Gone are the days when you had to struggle with long code files or rely on the professional help to get your website created. Now, you can do it all on your own using the technologies like WordPress.
So to create yellow pages directory website, you can use one of the available yellow pages website templates. It is a yellow pages website builder designed for creating online Yellow Pages websites with WordPress in minutes. All you need to do is to install this yellow pages clone script and update the sample data with the actual data.
You can download yellow pages directory from here and install it by logging into your WordPress dashboard. Once you have installed yellow page script, you should also install the sample data to make it look exactly like our demo.
Now, you have a ready-made yellow pages website ready with example data. All you’re supposed to do now is to replace the sample data with original listings, update menu, branding, footer widgets and adjust the homepage elements the way you want.
Customize your Yelp Style WordPress website
Everyone’s requirements and plans for their website are different. A single theme or a template cannot satisfy everyone’s need and therefore, we have the customization options.
So, you can download yellow pages clone script, install it and adjust its appearance and functions as per your requirements. So that you can have your website looking and working just the way you want.
To customize a website, we’ll start with the branding.
Branding your yellow page directory WordPress
The Yellow Pages Directory template lets you upload a logo image or you can simply enter text to appear instead of an image. So if you have your business logo image ready, you can instantly upload it and re-brand your website.
Moreover, you can choose if you want to display the tagline under the site logo or not. Also, you can easily change the footer credits to instantly make the Yellow Pages Directory template appear as your very own website.
Changing colors and background
The next step in customizing your website will be to change the color, background and the graphics of your website.
Thankfully, to change the color of your website you won’t need to access the CSS files and find the code that corresponds to the color of the specific part of your site that you want to change. In fact, you can just click a button and change the colors and background of your website.
Also, it is easy to reorganize the homepage of your Yellow pages directory template as it is completely widgetized. If you want to change the position of any of the section on the screen, then you can do so easily by moving the widgets.
Yellow Pages WordPress directory software comes with a live customizer that lets you see the live preview of the changes made into website. So even before you save the color and apply it, you can first see how your site will look with the changes applied. Only if you like the effect, you can save the changes.
Besides, menus are equally important on the homepage of a directory website. Because Directory websites are massive websites with multiple categories and subcategories.
Therefore, there has to be an organized way through which the visitors can easily find what they are looking for. And for that, the Yellow pages Directory software comes with mega menu. It’s really easy to add items to this mega menu and show all the important categories for your website, right on the homepage (and near the header).
Setting up other pages
You can obviously decide what content you want to show on the sidebar of a page. Sidebars are important because if used properly, they can really help you retain the traffic on your website.
The sidebars of the Yellow Pages WordPress software are totally widgetized. So you can show whatever content you want into the sidebar. The sidebars can also be used to display advertisements on your website.
The Yellow pages Directory software comes with many customization options. They are enough to make your website look and work the way you want.
If you are a designer and know how to change the CSS files to make advanced changes into the appearance of the Yellow pages directory theme, you can use the custom css feature. You can rewrite the class and it will override the existing class in the theme files, and therefore can apply custom changes to the appearance of your website.
Also read: Tips and Tricks for designing your yellow pages website.
Offering Listing submission on your Yellow pages
Nothing more important than listings on a yellow pages directory, right?
So now, we will see how you can add listings on your Yellow page’s website to make it useful for people at large.
Create all the categories that you want
Before actually starting with listings, we need to create all the listing categories. The Yellow pages directory software for WordPress lets you create categories and subcategories in hierarchical form.
The categories are important because they help you keep your listings organized. Also, it makes it easy for the visitors to look and find from a particular category without wasting their time.
The Yellow Pages directory software lets you set a different price for submitting under different categories. You can set the category icons to make your website more interactive.
So before you start adding listings or allowing paid listing submission on your website, you must create all the categories that you want for your yellow pages directory.
Adding listings to your yellow pages script
A yellow pages portal is one where the businesses can advertise themselves and the visitors can find the list of businesses with the services they want. Each business can advertise itself by submitting a listing under a specific category.
The listings on your Yellow Pages directory website can be added in two ways
- Listings submitted by the admin through the dashboard
- Paid listings submitted by the visitors through frontend submission form
1. Listing submitted by the admin through the back end of your WordPress website
You, as an admin, can add listings to your own website by logging in to your WordPress dashboard.
All you are supposed to do is to create a new listing, add the details, images etc, choose the category and publish it.
The process is similar to how you add blogs to your WordPress website. The only difference here is that instead of the plain text area, the listings of the yellow pages directory will have different fields.
You will need to add listings to your website at the initial stage when very fewer people are aware of it. It takes time for your website to reach people and get the deserved traffic. But then no one’s going to visit a website with absolutely no useful data.
So before you start allowing paid submission, you can populate your website with some useful information by adding listings on your own through the admin panel.
2. Paid listing submissions by the visitors
And once your website gains popularity and enough traction, you can start providing paid listing submissions.
To inspire people to submit their listing on yellow pages directory, you can explain them the advantages of advertising on online yellow pages. So the businesses who want to advertise themselves on your business listing yellow pages can pay and post their listings.
To allow paid listing submission you will first require the payment packages to be displayed to your visitors.
Create pricing packages on your yellow pages software
You can create all the payment packages you wish with this yellow pages directory script.
While creating pricing packages, you have to decide for a name for the package, the price, how many listings are allowed to be submitted under the package, the validity of the listings once submitted and any other condition.
Also, you can create category specific packages that allows the visitors to post under a specific category only. These packages will be displayed to your visitors on the submission page. So before the visitors submit their listings, they have to select a payment package.
By default, the payment plans will be displayed to your visitors as displayed in the image below. But if you wish, you can copy the shortlink to your payment package and display it through the pricing tables.
Here’s how your payment plans for your Yellow pages directory template displayed though Pricing tables will look.
Checking the submitted listings
You can specify if you want the submitted listings on your website to be held for moderation or be directly published. It is recommended that you choose to hold the listings for moderation and not directly publish it.
It is important to keep a check on what your visitors are submitting on your site. When the submitted listings are held for moderation, they will be saved as a draft until you as an admin check and publish it. Therefore, you can check if a listing is complete and has all the data that makes sense to the visitors.
So one of the routines while maintaining a yellow pages directory is to keep a check on the submitted listings and to publish them after thoroughly checking their legitimacy and correctness.
The listing submission form: Modify or use it as it is
This is one of the most important features that will be very useful when your Yellow Pages website is live and you look forward to adding more categories with different requirements.
So, the Yellow Pages Directory software comes with a ready to use the listing submission form. But what if you want to change this form? What if you want to add a new field to your submission form?
This can be done using the custom fields options available with the Yellow Pages Directory template. It lets you easily create a new field for a submission form. Moreover, you can create a field and assign it to a specific category only. Therefore, it is possible to customize your submission for your categories too.
Other plugins
WordPress is an open source CMS and there’s no limit of the features you can add to make your WordPress based website more interesting. Even for a yellow pages directory based on WordPress, there are endless chances to optimize the performance of your website as well user experience using different WordPress plugins.
Browse this list of best WordPress plugins.
Other ways to monetize your yellow pages directory software
A directory is a massive website. Unlike Business websites or blogs, the Directory website takes more efforts to manage and maintain. Therefore, there have to be more than one ways to earn through it.
Like we talked in the above section, one way to monetize your website is by allowing paid listing submission. However, here, we will discuss more ways through which you can make money through yellow pages or any such online directory website.
Ad banners
Ad monetization works for any kind of website. And so it does for the directory website with massive traffic.
You can display advertisement banners in the sidebars or any section of your Yellow pages directory website. These advertisements can be static advertisements from the sponsors who are interested to publicize through your site.
Alternately, you can subscribe to Google AdSense, which is a great way to deliver targeted adverts to your visitors and earn through advertisements sponsored by Google. The advertisements here are based on the interests of the visitors and their browsing history.
However, you can use both the forms of advertising to make money through your Yellow page’s website.
Option to Claim listings on your yellow pages directory software
The claim listing feature is when a business sees it’s listing on your website and wants to claim the ownership of their listing.
By getting the ownership of a listing, the business can add more details and update it to make it more useful. So a business already listed on your yellow page’s website through some different source can claim the ownership of the listing by submitting a claim using the form shown below and paying the claim price.
Field monetization and Membership
Besides, there are plugins like field monetization as well as membership plugin through which you can restrict the visibility of the content on your page. You can allow access to the paid members only and thereby earn through it.
Promoting your Yellow Pages WordPress website
Once your website is ready and live, we shall move on to the promotional part. The key efforts here will be to make people aware of your yellow pages directory.
Promoting your website built with Yellow Pages WordPress template gets easier with some of the inbuilt features:
Social options on your yellow pages directory software
The listings created with the Yellow pages directory script are social media ready. So when a user is interested in a listing of your website and wants to share it with his social circles, he can do so just with a click.
The share buttons inspire the visitors can share the listings on your website easily. Even the listing owners can share their listing on their social media. Social media is nowadays the easiest ways to reach a large number of people with similar interests in a very short time.
Advertising on local channels
You can decide on the advertising channel for your website depending on its scope. For instance, if your website’s scope is limited to a certain geographical location like a city or a province, then the best idea is to promote it through local media.
Promoting with local media can be anything – Television, newspaper advertisements, etc.
There can be innumerable ways through which you can promote your website. To know the best ways, you can watch what the competition is doing, how other online businesses in your locality are advertising.
You can even ask your users (who submit their listings on your site) to promote their listings.
SEO and Blogging with your Yellow pages software
The Yellow pages directory software is already designed as per strict SEO standards. Therefore, you won’t have to worry much about the SEO score of your website.
But, you do have to take care of the content/pages that you add from your side. For this, the yellow pages software allows you to integrate the best SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, All-in-one SEO pack, etc.
These let ns lets you check and improve the SEO score of your pages and posts.
Considering the importance of engaging content for any kind of directory website, I always recommend maintaining blogs on any kind of website because of the following three reasons
- It lets you keep your visitors updated with the latest news, special offers, etc.
- It is good for SEO and visibility of your website (Content marketing?)
- The users will find a connection to your site with the help of the content you provide
The Yellow Pages Directory script comes with a ready to use blog section. Just create the categories for your blogs and start blogging on your yellow pages online directory. Alternately, you can hire an SEO & Digital marketing agency to promote your website for you.
Read: How to promote your Yellow pages website?
Maintenance routines for your Online directory
The maintenance tasks for all the websites are almost the same. However, when you are running online Yellow Pages directory, there are certainly more tasks involving the listing or user maintenance.
Besides them, the following are some of the maintenance tasks that you should run at regular intervals to keep your website up to date.
- Check the submitted listings
- Speed and security check
- Backing up your website at regular intervals
- Check the contact forms on your site and see it they are working properly
- Regular reviewing and updating the adverts on your site
- Remove outdated data from your website
Read More: Yellow Pages Directory Maintenance Routines
Conclusion
Website creation is now easier and effortless. With the WordPress and easy to use Software, you can save your time and efforts.
Also, the use of the internet is increasing day by day and so is the popularity of online Directories. People tend to use the internet (and the web directories) to know about places, things and services. Therefore, setting up an online business with your WordPress Yellow Pages Directory website can be advantageous in many ways.
Now, are you ready to create your own Yellow pages website with WordPress?
Also see: How to create AirBnb clone WordPress website with WordPress.