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But first I want to help you decide which services are better, and let you know the benefits and drawbacks of using them. This massage site list is mostly massage specific directories, with the exception of Craigslist. They are designed to grab people who are searching for a massage on-line, and help them find a therapist in your area. There are a number of them that offer free listing and there are paid ones. The primary concern and problem that many therapists have with these services is that many of the directories are not very careful about screening out postings that are of a “less professional” nature. So depending on how you create your ad, you may get a number of calls that you don't want. But I would not write these services off completely because of the problems other therapists have had. Do your own research. At the end of this page I give some tips on creating an ad that reduces negative calls. As you evaluate each directory look at the ads of other therapist offering services in your area. If there are a lot of unprofessional listings, it might not be a great place to put your number. So how else do you decide which directories to use on this massage site list? It is important to realize that these services will only bring you some business if people who are searching for a massage in your area find these websites. They have to find the service first in the search engine, before they find you. So the question is, how easy are these services to find? How do they compare? To answer that question I did a little study to see how they all compare by their Google page rank number, and by their Alexa rankings. Both of these numbers tell you a little bit about how well ranked and visited these sites are. Basically the higher the Google page rank number, the more likely they are to be found by someone searching on Google. And the lower the Alexa rank number the better. With each directory that I have listed below, I have included their Google and Alexa rank number for you to study. When you look at them note that they all have a very similar Google page rank. And they almost all have very good Alexa rankings also. Any number lower than about 750,000 means that that site is in the top 1% of all sites on the Internet based on the Alexa criterion. Some are better than others. Now take these numbers with a big grain of salt. They provide you information about the entire web site, but they don't tell you the one critical thing you need to find out. And that is, do they have good search engine rankings for the specific types of searches potential clients will do for massage in your area? The most important thing you can do to see which of these directories on this massage site list would bring you the most business is to do some search engine research. Pretend you are a person looking for a massage therapist in your area. They won't be searching for you. They will be searching for general terms like: Seattle massage, massage therapist Seattle, massage therapy Seattle, etc. Do these types of searches, and as many others variable you can think of for your area. Use at least three different search engines, MSN, Google, Yahoo, etc. See which of these massage directories show up on the first page of the search engine results. Give weight to the most likely types of searches. Doing this will tell you which one of these companies has higher page rankings for the actual search terms for your area. Their page rankings for your specific area are all that really count. It is the most important thing. So research this entire massage site list before you decide who to go with. OK. Here is the massage site list with their prices. www.massagelistings.com www.massage-classifieds.com Note: The Google and Alexa rank and pricing was researched on 9/05/05. You will notice that I have included Craigslist in this massage site list. It is not specifically a massage directory, but it is very popular with massage therapists, for good reasons. Look at the rankings for it. It is one of the top most visited sites of all sites anywhere, including Google, MSN, and Yahoo. And it gets results. Like all of these, you have to be careful about what type of calls you get. Make sure you post in the correct Craitslist for your area. With any of these massage site list directories, do a good job of the next step. Notice how much competition you may have in your area on the directory. Just like in the yellow pages, what do you have to do to get noticed? If you are not noticed, you will not get the calls. Now when you actually post your business with these massage site list directories, you can do some things in your ad to make sure you only get the types of calls you want. Have some very clear language that states something like this: I offer licensed/certified professional massage services only, for therapeutic, healing, and relaxing purposes. DO NOT CALL if you are looking for any sexual services. (Maybe use another word other than sexual so you don't come up under searches of massage and sexual.) Finally, if you work alone, or do out calls, be careful about advertising. There are many other ways to build your business offered on this site that might be safer. There is a benefit of posting with these massage site list services that you may not realize. If you have a website, having a link to your site from a high ranking, massage specific website can do wonders for raising your site search engine rankings. The paid directories will do better for this than the free ones. Return from Massage Site List to the Massage Business Marketing Ideas section
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