Setting up a directory of brands in Wordpress / SEO considerations

Potatoe

Potatoe

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I have a few questions about setting this up before I dive in and I'm looking for some feedback. I have never set up a directory before but this site is begging for one. I'm probably overthinking this a lot, but some feedback would really help me get on the right path here. I'm far from being an expert when it comes to SEO, so thanks in advance for your insights.

I have a magazine site that covers a very large niche that has a lot of smaller-sized businesses all around the world. They're my competitors in the sense that we're trying to appear in similar SERPs, but they're not my competitors in the sense that we have different business models and I'm writing about the things that they sell - so there's room to be pals. There are also a lot of personal blogs and websites in this niche, lots of opportunities for networking...

I want to setup a directory and feature as many of these businesses and blogs as I can, as a way to open up the doors of communication. My plan is that they'll link to and share the pages in my directory that feature them as a way to 'showoff' to their audience that they were featured. On top of that, a lot of these brands get decent search volume so I could monetize those pages as well if they actually start to get traffic. So it's not really going to a directory that just lists a bunch of names, website URL, phone number, and a brief write-up.. it's going to be a really complimentary feature for each business. I hope to appeal to their vanity and ego, and to have something their social media people can safely share.

I'm wondering if there's a good Wordpress plugin that could help with this, or if I'm better off just making the main index page that lists all of them (In alphabetical order? Or.. not sure. Have to figure out the best way to sort that...) and then just creating a wordpress "Page" for each one the old fashioned way.

I know very little when it comes to coding, but I'm thinking I could also start tagging my posts that mention particular brands with the brand's name, and then having an area on each brand's page in the directory that shows the titles + links to the most recent X posts that mention said brand (But maybe I want the juice flowing the other way instead?)

So what I mentioned above would look kind of like this...

Main list of brands 8> Links to an individual page for each brand 8> Which dynamically lists the most recent X posts (Or all?) that mention said brand <8> Then for my posts, whenever I mention a brand, I could also link to the directory page? Pros or cons of having the links going both ways?

8> meaning the link points one way, <8> meaning the pages link to one another...

...

And my next conundrum. I'm going to target the keyword ["niche" Brands] with this directory, which will be a list of the niche's brands... and that KW gets decent volume too. Let's hope that some of the brands that I feature end up linking to my homepage at domain.com instead of (or in addition to) their directory page. I'll have a link to "Niche Brands" on my menu, too.

Could there be an advantage to having my outbound link to them on niche-brands.domain.com as opposed to domain.com/niche-brands? Like would it be treated as a reciprocal link if I link to them on my directory page at /niche-brands and they link to my homepage, and not treated as a reciprocal link of I link to them from niche-brands.domain.com and they link to my homepage at domain.com? I'm leaning towards doing domain.com/niche-brands/name-of-company as opposed to niche-brands.domain.com/name-of-company, for the sake of building up the power of my main domain.

I'm pretty sure I want to do this by hand since I want to put TLC into each listing, but maybe I can use something like XPath (On my reading list, don't know the first thing about it yet...) to scrape some information as well. Also if I could setup a spreadsheet with the name of each brand and a few pieces of key info, and then have Wordpress automatically create a page and fill in a few areas of information that would get me off to a good head start. Is that what "custom fields" are for?

I know I've asked about a dozen questions in here so... take your pick! lol.. thanks again!
 
I think every single WordPress plugin for directories creates a custom post type in WordPress. This means your idea of just posting them all is close to what a plugin would be doing. The plugin would make it instead of posting under post/pages (WP defaults), you'd create a separate one called 'brands'. I prefer just creating my custom post type and doing it that way, you could use a plugin created just for directories though since you're new to this.

As far as how to lay it out your best bet is looking at competitors and seeing where they lack. It really depends on the purpose of the directory.

For the url path and whether or not to have the keyword in the parent folder, I would say yes you should do that. Something like /directory/business-area/business-name (again this depends on the directory). It's better to have a descriptive url like that. I don't see why a subdomain would be needed here, especially if you'd just be doing another WP installation.

For your idea of grabbing content by scraping, that's a big yes. Posting these all manually one at a time is the completely wrong way. Scrape with whatever you want, put it into a CSV, import to WP with any CSV to WP plugins. That's how I personally manage content on my sites, much easier. Format wise as well you will want a lot of these metrics you're scraping into separate custom fields in WordPress. This means don't put their phone number in the post editor, instead have a custom field called 'phone number'. This makes for easier editing, coding, and importing/exporting.
 
j a m e s said:
niche-brands.domain.com
Click to expand...

There's two reasons I wouldn't worry about this. The first is I just simply wouldn't worry about the reciprocal link conundrum. I don't think you're going to get a large percentage of these guys linking back to you, based on what you've described. I'm thinking companies. Some individual bloggers might. Maybe some social media shout outs and a few links.

The second is that you're going to bust your butt to create this giant directory and then essentially give all the indexing power and page rank juice generation to what is essentially a separate domain. I'd rather have 1000 new pages that get links going to my main domain. A sub-domain, to oversimplify, is basically a separate domain in terms of racking up the stats.

I agree with what Julian is saying about organizing all of this in a CSV and doing a mass import using custom fields. This will make it easier for you to style too, but you need to think well in advance of how this is going to look before you import, or you're going to have a headache on your hands.
 
Thanks a lot for the insights fellas, I'm going to let this marinate over the weekend and sketch up some rough drafts of how I see the pages looking, then I'll start stumbling my way through some code and seeing what I can come up with. I'd hate to have it just about finished then realize "Oh, I should have done this..."

This is all completely new to me, so either way it'll be a good learning experience. Part of me is tempted to just roll up the sleeves, grab a VA to help with research and building the CSV, and just do it manually... But if I just get over this hump and learn a more effective way, I can use that again and again... Especially if this strategy ends up working out for me, this could be a great way to get new projects off the ground.

Julian - For each page in the directory.. which is almost more like a "profile" of that particular brand.. I plan on having things like Name, year established, homepage url, a quick description of who they are / what they do, a logo (Maybe? Unless I'm opening myself up to trouble by using their logos without permission, even if it's complimentary) ... but then I want to add in more unique content than that, 200-300 words, a unique featured image, some pictures of their products or just relevant images... Maybe a section like "Where to buy [brand] online:" if I capture traffic for said brand.. Wondering if you think the scrapping + posting via CSV method is still the clear winner when the majority of the content on each page is going to be new content that I create? Hell even if I don't end up scraping all of the info and I just spend an afternoon making the CSV by hand, just automating the posting alone seems like it would make things way easier.

Ryu - I think you're right that it's not likely that I'll have a ton of these sites lining up to link to me. With the smaller bloggers I'm thinking I'll have a better success rate, but I'm especially hoping some of the bigger brands that have "In the press" style pages will add my mention of them, if I'm really lucky maybe I can score a couple homepage "As soon on..." logo links. If I put up 200 pages here and get 20 relevant links and some shares, I'll be ecstatic, and that should really start to move the dial.

Once it's all up, I plan on reaching out to each business of course... Wondering if anyone can suggest a best practise for that? I was thinking I could tweet them the link, and if they acknowledge it then use that as my foot in the door, if they don't acknowledge the tweet then try email? For the smaller blogs it'll be the same people answering the tweets as the emails, however for the bigger brands they'll have a separate team for social and for emails I'd just be filling out their 'contact us' forms. Before that, I want to get my social numbers up too because I think that'll help get my 'calls' answered, so to speak.

Thinking out loud and out of my zone. Everyone please tear any holes if any of this sounds dumb, or let me know what makes sense.

Y'know what, I was going to do a journal of working my way through the DSCC, but some things got shuffled around this month... I'll journal the process of setting up this directory, maybe by the end I'll have a useful blueprint that'll help somebody else down the road. Alright, off to go learn custom post types 101... cheers.
 
Yea for any large content import/edit, directory or not, CSV import is the way to go. Manually posting each one is hours of extra work that is unneeded. The import plugins allow you to update old posts when re-importing too. It's all cake, don't even sweat it. You can start with name, address, phone number, and then import that--after a few weeks you can circle back and add more data and import that. It's not over-bearing (I can understand thinking that at first).

You're talking about promotion before you actually did market research though, so don't get ahead of yourself. Develop a more concrete way you want to tackle this and then just do it.

Without actually seeing it I can't comment much on the layout, efforts, etc.
 
I HIGHLY recommend WP All Import. When it comes to CSV imports, it will make your life sooooo much easier. You can basically get your design template/recipe knocked out beforehand, import and determine how to structure your usage of custom fields to ensure data integrity, and once you have a consistent template/import that works, you can automate the import if you get to that point in the future. Throw a CSV on your server or somewhere else, and set WPAI to query it on your specified schedule.
 
Just wanted to give a quick update on this while I learn as I go, finally had a chance to make some progress on this today.

I'm using a plug-in called Custom Post Type UI and I've got a custom post type setup called "Brands".

I think my URL structure is going to be [niche][modifier].com/brands/[brand-name] and when I link to it from the site's main navigation menu the anchor will be [Niche] Brands. I could go with /niche-brands/, but the niche is already present in my domain name so I don't think I need to double down.

I have found several similar directories, now I need to figure out how to scrape them and how to put that information into a CSV.

I'm assuming that to scrape one of the data sources, I'll basically teach the scraper where to look for certain data like the company name on each page in the competitor's directories, and then I'll have the company names added to the same column in the csv. Then same deal for their homepage, phone number, social accounts, whatever other info I decide to include.

So the scraper will fill the data into the CSV, then I can use a plugin like WP Import All to take the information from the CSV and import it into Wordpress by populating custom fields that I've created for the various data points, which are displayed in a template by something like Advanced Custom Fields.

Then I can hop in after that's all setup and add a basic description for each brand into the normal Wordpress editor section for each of my newly populated pages (Or, actually, it would be quicker to just bang these out inside of the CSV itself so that I don't need to go open up and edit each post one by one to add the unique descriptions, I could use the template editor in Advanced Custom Fields to have the description near the top alongside each brand's logo or something with their image add-on...)

Here's what I've got in my head so far, if I'm way off base I'd really appreciate a heads up lol.

1) Figure out how to scrape
2) Collect data from existing directories
3) Populate custom post types and advanced custom fields with data
4) Write unique descriptions for each brand
5) Post brand directory pages live to site
6) Create "main" page at domain.com/brands/ that lists all of the brands in the directory. Might look into directory plug-ins if they can play nice with my existing custom post type. Having a sortable table a-la WP Simon Tables would be nice, but manually adding each post from my custom post type to my main index page is a headache, so I'll look for a a way to automate this. Maybe just a page that pulls everything from my custom post type in alphabetical order or divided by letter or something. Not sure about this part yet. This is where a directory plugin or theme would come in handy.

Now, I know I could just get a VA or mturkers or whoever to create my CSV by hand for probably $150 and typically I'd go that route instead of learning to scrape, because from there everything else in this whole process seems pretty do-able (The whole scraping thing is where I'm 100% out of my element, everything else I'm only about 40% out of my element) but my only objective isn't just to get this directory built as efficiently as possible, it's also to learn how to do it so that I'm all set when it's time to add new brands, and when it's time to build directories in a similar fashion for other projects. Rather than a new thread, I'll just continue to document the journey right here.
 
Use Kimono Labs, URL Profiler, or Scrapebox to scrape these directories. Kimono Labs is probably most user-friendly.

With that 'main page' you're talking about. Once you have all these posts imported you can display them in a 'loop'. WordPress loops allow you to sort by date, alphabetical, or by custom fields, etc. That means you just call the posts with PHP and not manually. You wouldn't 'create a page' for /brands/ either. This would be the archive/taxonomy of the custom post type already.
 
@juliantrueflynn Awesome thanks again for keeping me on the right track with this.
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Will report back when I've made some more progress.
 
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