Exhaustive directory versus local best of lists

David Mihm, a writer for Search Engine Land, kindly mentioned CityVoter in a recent article he wrote, and he gave our website credit for doing a great job helping Google maps find and showcase local businesses. He also pointed out that our website is limited because we don't do a good job of providing a longer list of business categories to help small businesses categorize themselves correctly. In his article, he mentions it was hard to find a good place to list a company that specializes in "Environmental Services".

It's a valid point, but it's purposeful. While we welcome all kinds of businesses so people can recommend their favorites, our site is designed to focus on the categories consumers are most passionate about: arts & entertainment, beauty, fashion, weddings, restaurants, health and fitness, etc. We're about best of lists. We focus on these categories and use our voting to filter these lists down to the most popular top 5 businesses in each category. This does not provide a valuable exhaustive directory, it provides an invaluable cheat sheet of must dos/eats/visits.

What if I'm passionate about my environmental services vendor? You can tell us, but we're going to try and stay focused on what we're best at. While we provide useful advertising for contractors, plumbers, and other service vendors, who want to reach local consumers, we would expect consumers to use Angie's List or the Yellow Pages to locate and research those professionals.

We remain stubbornly focused on our core at CityVoter because we believe there is too much noise on directory and review sites to help people use these sites for things they are most interested and passionate about. SEO experts continue to battle us on this by putting their plumber clients in our burger categories, but fortunately our contest and monitoring services work hard to highlight and filter the most popular businesses.

Thanks for the mention, David. Now...if you can just convince KATU or KPTV or KGW to launch their best of Portland, we'd be all set.