B2B Marketing Method – Trade Directory Promotion

International trade is a two-way communication process: exporters are looking for importers, while importers are looking for exporters in the same time. Usually, you take the initiative to look for customers. But as an exporter or importer, have you thought to let customers directly, quickly and easily find you ?

To let potential customers find you directly and easily, the only thing you have to do is to promote your business worldwide. Classified business directory promotion is one of effective international trade promotion methods. Directory promotion can increase your site exposure and ranking, bring more traffic and finally increase more sales.

Directory promotion is easy . Firstly, you can find out many trade directories like https://www.exportbureau.com / etc. Then submit your company profile, product information, contacts etc. to these trade directories. Though it’s easy, but some skills are also important. Now let’s take the trade directory for an example to introduce these skills.

Step 1. Pre-preparation & Points For Attention

Before submit your link to , prepare the following information: Title (title), URL (Web site), Description (Company Profile), contact information (address, telephone number , email, etc.), META Keywords (web page keywords), and META Description (website description).

1. Title (title) should be composed neatly .
It’s better to write the title as “company full name (or domain name) – a brief overview of your company or company’s business activities”. For example, title of Alibaba is “Alibaba Manufacturer Directory – Suppliers, Manufacturers, Exporters & Importers”.

2. Description (Company Profile) , usually about 300 ~ 500 English characters.
Introduce your company’s business activities, products, target markets and so on, which give visitors an a rough idea of your company.

3. META Keywords (web page keywords), and META Description (page description) are primarily written for search engine‘s crawl and information retrieval . Well-written keywords and Description can increase better pageranks and more exposure when potential customers do a related search . So META Keywords & Description are also important.
META Keywords can be company’s product names (such as steel, plastic …), keywords of business activities (such as export, import, supply, sell, buy, trade …), types of your company (such as the exporter, importer, manufacturer, suppliers, factory, wholesalers …), the national, regional keywords (Germany, USA …) and so on. Usually, 3~6 keywords are enough.
META Description should be a brief company introduction of 3 to 4 sentences (about 100 ~ 180 English characters ).

4. Points For Attention:
1) If you submit to an English directory, do not use non-English letters, punctuation and characters. Non-English characters may result in unreadable characters and affect search engine‘s crawl.
2) Submit accurate description: Do not use deception or misleading information, because every submitted link will be manually reviewed before approval.

Step 2. Pay attention to directory inclusion guideline & requirements before submission

Some directories are paid directories, such as https://www.business.com/, ;
Some directories offer free link submission, such as
Some directories accept all kinds of links, like the best-known directory ;
You should also obey the submission rules of the directory. Otherwise, your submission probably will be denied.

Step 3. Submit to the most appropriate category, should not submit your site to an unrelated industry category.

Step 4. Update your company’s information
If your companies business activities have changed, don’t forget to update your link details in directories.

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Trade Directory Promotion