Which business listings are worth it in Portsmouth, and which want your money

Two different things get called directories and they are not the same product. The first is a listing: your name, address and phone on a site that Google reads, almost always free, and worth holding because it helps you appear on the map. The second is a lead platform: you pay, either monthly or per enquiry, and it sells you work. You want all of the first kind that matter, which is fewer than you think, and you want to judge the second kind like any other advertising spend. Most Portsmouth businesses have this backwards, paying for leads while their free listings sit half finished or contradicting each other.

The free layer: six that matter and a long tail that does not

The free listings do one job. They confirm to Google that a business with this name, at this address, on this number, really exists. Google is not counting them like votes. It is checking whether the story is consistent. Six of them carry nearly all the weight.

After those, the return drops off a cliff. There are hundreds of UK aggregator sites that will happily list you, and adding yourself to fifty of them is a day of your life for close to nothing. Worse, it multiplies the chance of the problem in the next section.

The thing that actually makes listings work

It is not how many you have. It is whether they agree with each other. Google is matching your name, address and phone number across the web, and every version that disagrees is a small reason to be less certain it is the same business.

The disagreements are almost always accidental and almost always old. A mobile on one listing and the landline on another. Suite 2 on one and Unit 2 on the next. A postcode from the unit you left in 2019. A trading name with Ltd on some and not on others. None of it looks like a problem when you read it, and all of it is why the map is unsure about you.

Write your name, address and phone once, exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile, into a note on your phone. Paste it every time. That one habit is worth more than thirty new listings.

In Portsmouth there is a local wrinkle worth knowing. A lot of trades here work from home in the terraces of Fratton, Copnor or Buckland and do not want the house on the internet. That is a service area business and it is a supported setting: you hide the address and set the areas you cover. What you must not do is invent a plausible address or borrow a friend's unit, because the whole system is built on checking that the address is real.

The paid layer: judge it like advertising, not like SEO

Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark are not listings. They are lead generation, and they work on one of two models: a subscription, where you pay to be visible, or pay per lead, where you buy each enquiry, usually alongside several competitors buying the same one. Both can be perfectly sensible purchases. Neither does anything for your own ranking, and it is worth being clear-eyed that the customer they introduce you to is, in an important sense, still theirs.

Fees change often enough that any number printed on a page like this would be wrong within months, so ask for current terms and read them. The four questions that tell you most:

1. Is the lead exclusive, or sold to several trades at once?
2. What is the refund position on a lead that is a wrong number, out of area or a job you do not do?
3. Is there a minimum term, and what does leaving involve?
4. Can you see, before signing, how many enquiries your trade actually got in this postcode last month?

Then do the arithmetic nobody does. Take what you paid last quarter, divide by the jobs you actually won from it, and compare that with the value of a job. A platform that costs a fifth of a job's margin is cheap. One that costs most of it is a hobby.

When the paid layer is the right answer

It is not a trick question and the honest answer is sometimes. A new business with no reviews and an empty diary cannot wait six months for the map to notice it, and buying work while the free layer matures is a reasonable trade. The mistake is staying there for years, still renting a position that could have been earned.

The tell is where your enquiries come from after eighteen months. If it is still almost all platform, nothing has been built. We cover how the other doors compare in our guide on Checkatrade, Bark or your own website.

The ones we would skip

• Anything that emails you claiming your listing is about to expire, or that you have a compliance problem. The free ones do not expire and they do not chase you.
• Paid submission services that promise to add you to hundreds of directories, which is precisely the volume that creates the inconsistency in the section above.
• Any site that will not show you a real page with real local businesses on it before asking for payment.
• Review platforms that are not the one your customers actually use. In most Portsmouth trades that is Google, by a distance.

What to do this week

1. Search your own business name in a private window and write down every listing that comes back, including the ones you did not create.
2. Fix the name, address and phone on each so they are identical, starting with the Google Business Profile.
3. Claim Bing Places and Apple Business Connect if you have not, which is about twenty minutes each.
4. Check whether your trade body has a public register and whether your entry is complete.
5. Work out your real cost per won job on any platform you pay for, and decide with a number rather than a feeling.

None of that is difficult and all of it is the groundwork the map sits on. If you would rather it was done properly and once, that is part of what we do in local SEO, and you can ask us for a quote.