Do Your Agency's Whole Job in 2 Google Searches: Find Every Free Business Directory for Your Industry and City

Search 1. Swap in your industry and your city. The second line is the one from the video.

[industry] [city] url:business-directory

plumbing services dallas url:business-directory

What it returns: pages whose web address contains business-directory, which is how directory sites name their listing pages. In the video, plumbing services dallas url:business-directory (Google set to United States) returned the Better Business Bureau's Plumber near Dallas, TX page with 2,587 listings, RevenueBase, Yelp's Top 10 Best Plumbing Companies in Dallas, Forbes' Find the Best Plumbers in Dallas, eGuamdirectory, ServiceAgent and a State Water Heaters contractor finder with a List your business here button. A mix of directories and roundup pages, and every one has a way in.

Search 2. Your competitor's name in quotes, then minus site colon, their domain.

"[competitor name]" -site:[theirsite.com]

"BillyGO DFW LLC" -site:billygo.com

What it returns: every page that mentions the competitor except the competitor's own site. In the video, "BillyGO DFW LLC" -site:billygo.com returned MapQuest, the State Water Heaters contractor finder, HomeAdvisor, Tracxn, Angi, Crunchbase, VidTao, findtexasplumbers.com and Verified Node. Most of those are directories with a free listing form, and your competitor is already on them.

Trick via @heytony.agency on Instagram. Tested on mavek.ai on 9 October 2026 with seo agency mumbai url:business-directory (Clutch, Superb Companies, RevenueBase) and "peec ai" -site:peec.ai (LinkedIn, Capterra, Tracxn, Scalenut, Writesonic, Radarkit, Marketer Milk).

The Listing Log

Five columns, one row per directory. The example rows are the sites from the Dallas searches above. Copy the table into Google Sheets or Numbers, or paste the tab-separated block under it straight into a blank sheet.

Site	URL	Listed?	Date	Notes
Better Business Bureau	bbb.org	Not yet		Search 1. Plumber near Dallas, TX page, 2,587 listings.
Yelp	yelp.com	Not yet		Search 1. Top 10 Best Plumbing Companies in Dallas.
Angi	angi.com	Not yet		Search 2. Lists BillyGO DFW, LLC with a 5.0 rating.
HomeAdvisor	homeadvisor.com	Not yet		Search 2. Lists BillyGO DFW, LLC, Grapevine, TX.
MapQuest	mapquest.com	Not yet		Search 2. Address and map listing.

Listed? takes three values: Not yet, Submitted, Live. Date is the day you submitted. Notes is where the login, the approval email and the "they wanted money for the featured tier, skipped" go, so you never fill the same form twice.

How Do You Get Listed on Every Free Business Directory Google Shows?

1. Open Google and type search 1 with your industry and city. The video used plumbing services dallas url:business-directory. If Google is showing another country's results, the region switch is at the bottom of the results page (Update location).
2. Skip the AI Overview and the Sponsored results. Scroll until the first result with a grey domain line under the name. That is where the directories start.
3. Open every result in a new tab. Cmd+click on a Mac, Ctrl+click on Windows. All ten at once; you are going to visit each one anyway.
4. On each site, look for the button. It reads List your business here, Add your business, Claim this listing or Get listed. On the State Water Heaters contractor finder in the video it sits at the top of the map, blue, next to "Are you a STATE installing contractor?".
5. Fill in the form. Business name, address, phone, website, category, hours. Same spelling and the same phone number on every site, because directories copy each other and a wrong number travels.
6. Log it. One row per site: Not yet becomes Submitted, with today's date.
7. Do page 2 and page 3. The pagination is at the bottom of the results. Fewer big names, more niche directories (eGuamdirectory, ServiceAgent) that have fewer plumbers on them and therefore more room for you.

How Do You Find Every Site That Lists Your Competitor?

1. Pick the competitor who outranks you for your own search. In the video that was BillyGO, a plumbing and HVAC company in Grapevine, TX.
2. Open their website and copy their business name as they write it. BillyGO's listings use the legal name BillyGO DFW LLC, so that is what went in the quotes. If the brand name and the legal name differ, run the search twice.
3. Copy their domain from the address bar: billygo.com.
4. Run search 2. "BillyGO DFW LLC" -site:billygo.com. Every result is a page about them that they do not own.
5. Open every result and get listed where they are listed. Angi, HomeAdvisor, MapQuest, findtexasplumbers.com, the State Water Heaters finder. Crunchbase and Tracxn list companies rather than tradespeople, so skip those unless you raise money.
6. Log each one with "Search 2, lists [competitor]" in Notes. Then do the same for your second-closest competitor.

Why Do Agencies Bill for This?

On the invoice it is called citation building or local listings management. The work behind it is the two searches above, an evening of form filling and a spreadsheet, and that is the part you were paying for: not the knowledge, the hours. An agency that bills thousands for it is charging a professional hourly rate for clerical work, which is a fair trade only if your time is worth more than theirs.

There are cases where it is. Forty locations, each with its own address and phone number, is a real project. A directory that keeps rejecting your submission needs someone to chase it. If the line item recurs every month, though, ask what changed since last month; a listing, once live, stays live. What an agency charges for an audit is on its own page, what an SEO audit costs in 2026, and the keyword research half of the invoice is free from Google too: Keyword Planner without running ads.

Where Mavek fits: it does not fill in directory forms. It does the rest of the job the agency was billing for, the crawl, the audit, the keyword map and the page drafts, on a schedule for every site you manage, and the AI visibility check tells you which of these directories ChatGPT and Perplexity actually read.

Key Takeaways

• Search 1: [industry] [city] url:business-directory. For plumbing services dallas it returned the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, RevenueBase, Forbes, eGuamdirectory and ServiceAgent.
• Search 2: "competitor name" -site:theirsite.com. For "BillyGO DFW LLC" -site:billygo.com it returned MapQuest, HomeAdvisor, Angi, Crunchbase, Tracxn, findtexasplumbers.com and more.
• Use -site:, not a bare minus domain. "peec ai" -peec.ai returned zero results; "peec ai" -site:peec.ai returned seven sites.
• Skip the AI Overview and the ads, open every result in a new tab, find the List your business here button, fill it in with the same name, address and phone every time, log it. Then page 2 and 3.
• Five listings tonight. The agency's line item for this is hours, not knowledge.

Frequently Asked Questions