What You Get
The Business Directory Listings Checklist is a three-page PDF for setting up and looking after your listings on Google, Bing, Apple Maps and the handful of UK directories worth the time. It starts with space for your business details, written once in the exact form you want them to appear, and then takes you through the listings in the order they matter.
It is the printable companion to our guide to UK business directories worth setting up. The guide explains the reasoning. The checklist is the version you keep beside you while you work through the sign-ups.
What Is Inside
- A master record for your name, address, phone, public email, website, hours, categories and description, to copy from every time
- The five free listings to do first, each with a tick box and a note on how you claim or verify it
- Sector picks: reviews platforms, FreeIndex, Yell, trade and professional directories, and local listings, with a test for deciding which to pay for
- Six traps to skip, including paid citation packages and two directories that are no longer worth adding yourself to
- The six steps to follow, in order, when your address, phone or name changes
- A check to run every three months, and what to record about each listing so that nothing depends on memory
Who This Is For
Owners of small UK businesses who want to be found by people searching nearby, and who have been told they need citations without being told which ones. It suits a business setting up its listings for the first time, and one that has moved or rebranded and needs to tidy up what is already out there.
How to Use This
Fill in the master record before you open a single sign-up page. Copying from it every time stops the small differences that make listings disagree, such as “Road” on one site and “Rd” on another, or a different phone number on each.
Then search for your business name, your old address and your old phone number in quotation marks, so that you claim listings that already exist instead of creating duplicates. Work through the first five listings in a week if you can. The sector picks can wait a month, and you only need two or three of them.
Why We Made This
In an audit we ran for a business that had moved office and changed its trading name, most of the listings we found still carried the old address. Nearly all of them had been copied from one out-of-date source, and fixing that source did not fix the copies straight away. The checklist is the order of work we would follow to avoid that, or to clean it up. The directory terms in it were checked on 3 October 2026.
Your listings send people to your website, so it needs to be ready for them. If you are pricing a new site, the Website Cost Checklist shows what each quote should include, and our own price is on the website page. If you are in Hampshire, we also do web design in Portsmouth.
Get the Checklist
Fill in the short form and the PDF opens straight away. We email you a copy of the link as well. The rest of the library is in resources.
