The library

Everything we know about
building directories

Starting one, filling it, getting it ranked and making it pay — written while building the WordPress plugin that runs them. Search it, or pick a topic below.

262 articles 8 topics Updated Apr 2026 No email wall
Eight ways in

Browse by what you're trying to do

The library is one long archive, which is fine for Google and useless for a person. These eight groups are how the articles actually cluster — pick the one that matches the problem in front of you.

8 topics 262 articles indexed
Start a directory Choosing the niche, standing the site up, and getting the first listings in. 20 articles Make it pay Paid listings, ads, leads, subscriptions — and what the market will bear. 16 articles Get found Directory SEO: pages that rank, links that stick, indexing that finishes. 22 articles Listings & data Claiming, cleaning, importing and syndicating the business records themselves. 94 articles Google surfaces Business Profile, Maps and the local pack — where most directory traffic decides. 21 articles WordPress mechanics Plugins, themes, hosting and the unglamorous parts that break at 3am. 70 articles Niches & verticals Real estate, rentals, restaurants, trades — how each vertical behaves differently. 17 articles Tools & software The extensions, scrapers and services that are worth an open browser tab. 25 articles

Groups overlap on purpose — an article about monetising a real-estate directory belongs in three of them, and it appears in all three.

If you're new

Three questions, in the order they come up

Almost everyone arrives asking one of these. Each path is three articles from across that cluster — not the three newest, so you get the range rather than the last thing published.

How do I get one live at all?
Niche, platform, structure and the first listings. The decisions that are expensive to reverse later.
All Start a directory
Where do the listings come from?
Sourcing, claiming, cleaning and keeping business records accurate once there are thousands of them.
All Listings & data
How does it make money?
Paid placement, ads, leads and subscriptions — what each one earns and who actually pays it.
All Make it pay
Newest first

The whole archive

Every published guide, newest first. Nothing gated, no summary version — the page you land on is the whole article.

Page 1 of 22
The short version

A notebook that happens to be public

This isn't a content-marketing programme with a lead magnet at the end of it. It's the working notes from building a directory plugin, published because the answers were hard to find the first time.

Written next to the product

Import formats, schema, sitemaps, local ranking, billing the businesses you list — every one of those was a problem in the plugin before it was an article here. The research had to happen either way.

You can check the claims

When a guide says a directory can hold 50,000 listings and still load fast, there's a public 50,000-listing demo you can open and run through PageSpeed yourself. No screenshots, no case-study PDF.

Nothing is gated

No email wall, no "download the full guide", no account. The article you land on is the entire article, and the plugin the articles are about is free on WordPress.org.

262
Published guides
8
Topic clusters
3
Live demos to test against
$0
To read, and to start building
The other half

Three routes out of the reading

A 4,000-word guide on directory monetisation is worth exactly nothing until something is live. Whichever article brought you here, one of these is the next step.

Install the free plugin
Dynamic location pages, LocalBusiness schema and both sitemaps on any WordPress theme, with no listing cap. It's the real product on WordPress.org, not a trial.
Get it on WordPress.org
Click through a real one
Three live directories at 10,000, 30,000 and 50,000 listings — real data, real search, real page speed. Open any listing page and speed-test it yourself.
See the live demos
Follow the build on video
Blank WordPress install to a live, indexed directory — every step written out and paired with the clip that shows it happening on screen.
Open getting started
None of the guides assume you use our plugin. They're written about directories, not about a product — the platform advice applies whether you build on WordPress, a SaaS builder or something you wrote yourself.
About the library

Questions about this blog

Where do I start if I've never built a directory?

Work the three questions in Start here in order — get one live, fill it, make it pay. That sequence is the whole business, and most of the mistakes people write in about come from doing them out of order: buying data before deciding the niche, or building a pricing page before there is anything to charge for.

Do I need your plugin to follow these guides?

No. The guides are about directories — niche selection, data quality, local SEO, pricing, the mechanics of getting business listings to rank — and almost none of it is specific to one piece of software. Where an article does get concrete about implementation it usually names WordPress, because that is what we build on and what most readers already run.

How do I find something specific in 262 articles?

Use the search box at the top of this page. It matches article titles and slugs rather than full text, so single words work best — airbnb, citation, schema, monetize — and two words narrow it further, because both have to appear. If a search comes back empty, the eight topic groups above are the wider net.

Why is everything about directories?

Because that is the only thing we build. TurnKey Directories is a WordPress plugin that turns a site into a business directory, and this library is the research behind it — how listings get found, what data sources are worth paying for, which revenue models businesses actually accept. The live demos are the same subject matter with the reading removed.

Is there a feed I can subscribe to?

Yes — the standard RSS feed is at https://turnkeydirectories.com/feed/, and it works in any reader. There is no newsletter and no signup form on this site, so the feed is the way to follow it.

Reading about it is
the slow way.

The free plugin gives you dynamic location pages, LocalBusiness schema and both sitemaps on any WordPress theme, with no listing cap. Start there and read the rest when you hit something.

Get the free plugin See the live demos
No listing cap No account needed Upgrade whenever
Elsewhere on the site
Getting started Blank WordPress install to a live directory, every step on video. Profit calculator What a directory of a given size is worth once businesses start paying. Every feature The full capability list, from bulk import to the ad zones and Stripe billing.