With a WordPress theme like Geoplaces, you can easily create beautiful city directory websites very easily.
It comes with a set of features and inbuilt functionalities that you can manage with intuitive options to create a website of your choice.
However, mentioned here are the best qualities of a successful directory website that you must include into your directory website:
1) Good, Clutter Free & Intuitive design
The design of your website leaves the first impression on your visitors’ website. There aren’t any parameters to determine the best design, but it totally depends on the concept of your website.
For a city directory website, you need a web design that is clutter and confusion free, beautifully responsive. A city directory has much more information to show as compared to a simple business or blog website.
A good design also means logical arrangement of the screen sections for driving the user attention to the important parts. However, you can pick a design that looks beautiful and is customizable. So, you can use the customization options and make your website look even better and make it even more meaningful for the users.
2)Simple and Easy Navigation
Navigation is really important. It is to make sure that once landed on your website, the visitors should find the content he’s looking for very easily.
The main navigation is obviously the menu, and you must choose a design that has a good menu design. Also, take your time to organize the menu with the items as well as sub-menu items to get started with. Make sure you include all the important links as menu items, buttons, or through anchor tags.
3) Speed of your directory website
This is the age of intense competition and superfast websites. Today, if you fail to deliver the content on time, there’s the highest risk of losing the traffic coming your way.
Therefore, you should aim for speedier, performance optimized, city directory websites. For this, try to pick a WordPress theme that is fast. Once you build your website, you can use a tool like gtmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to test the speed and optimize the pages on your site.
The lower the page load times, the better!
5) Mobile Friendly Directory website
Many people will use their mobile devices to access your website. If you have not prepared your website for them, you will end up disappointing a lot of important visitors.
So what you should do is, always prefer a mobile friendly city directory theme.
A mobile friendly city directory enables your visitors to smoothly navigate and find all the information beautifully organized on your site.
You can even get an app created for your WordPress city directory website at a later stage.
6) SEO Optimized City Directory
There’s no debate – SEO is important! If you need to survive the competition on the internet, you need to optimize your website for search engines.
Once you start obtaining organic traffic, there are so many things you can do to put the traffic to a proper use. But the struggle is to – obtain organic traffic.
There are multiple ways you can create an SEO optimized City directory website:
- Choosing an SEO friendly WordPress theme for your website
- Using the SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO plugin, etc.
- Optimizing individual pages for keywords relevant for your website
- Making sure your website is speed and performance optimized
- Use blogs for content marketing
- Link building for cross site marketing
Besides, there are many other things that you can do to optimize your website and make it SEO friendly.
7)Great Content
Content will always be the king. When it comes to online directories, they are already content rich. The city directory websites are information rich and therefore it is important for you to see that all the content hosted on your website is ‘quality content’.
Well, by content – I mean content on pages as well as blogs, content in form of text, images or multi-media formats like videos, audios, etc. Also, don’t forget to use the blogs on your site for making your site more interactive and interesting for your readers.
You should never add content to your website just for the sake of adding content on your site. Whatever content you add should be useful, unique, meaningful and should provide a value to the visitors. Besides, you should arrange in an interesting and readable format for easy intelligibility.
8) Proper Categories
The categories on your WordPress City directory website helps you keep your website well-organized. Another great advantage of having proper categories is that it makes your website really easy to browse for the visitors.
Before you start with your website, and start offering front end submissions, you must decide on all the categories you want your online directory to cover.
Online directory are prone to have a large amount of information in form of listings. Therefore, the only way to keep your website organized is by proper categorizations.
Besides, there are some directories that offer category based pricing for the listing submission. These online directories charge a higher price for popular categories and lower for others. There are also
9) Great Location-based features
When it comes to business listing, and websites to host the business listings, they are mostly location based. Obviously, location & maps play a very important role.
Most of the popular Directory websites come with map based listings to show the exact location of a business or event listing. This is the principle that we followed while developing our Directory WordPress theme. With Google Map integration, you can not only show the location graphically, but also include navigation features to find the easiest route to the destination.
The Directory theme also has a full screen map page where all the listings are marked with map markers for easy access for the visitors. The maps can also be displayed on the category page, where all the listings belonging to the specific categories are displayed on the map through Map markers.
Location based features, therefore, can also make it easy for your visitors to find the listings of their interested based on the location. Especially Google Map integration – it makes your site more intuitive and interesting.
10) Front end submission system
One of the most important features of any kind of online directory (city directory, classifieds directory, events directory) is a front end submission feature.
It can be a free of paid submission system, where the user can register and post his listing on the directory using the front end submission form.
So, the visitors can use the feature to add a new listing, under the relevant category, into your website. This not just adds to the number of listings, but contributes to SEO by involving more keywords, increases the amount of useful content on your site, etc.
It is understandable that a few types of online directories, don’t prefer to have such a feature. Unless you have a very strong reason to eliminate the front end submission system, we insist on allowing front end listing submission on your website.
11) Other features
Many other thing can help your directory website like working on user experience, trying different design variations, including good and pleasant colors, properly highlighting the important parts of the site, etc.
Unfortunately, the world of the internet is full of uncertainty. There’s absolutely no fixed strategy for guaranteed results. You can only learn through experiments and trying new thing as per the current trends.
However, here we have tried to find the best features that are commonly found in most of the best online directory websites. So if you are trying to build the best online directory website, the first thing to do is check if your website has all the above mentioned features and than try the advanced strategies for promoting your website.