How to manage your directory

Set the cadence

On the Publish tab, choose Monthly, Weekly, or Manual. Monthly suits most niches. Pick Weekly if your category churns fast (new openings, frequent closures); pick Manual if you would rather press the button yourself.

What it costs

0.05 credits per listing, per cycle. A 100-listing directory is 5 credits a refresh; a 300-listing one is 15. The Overview and Publish tabs both show your exact per-cycle cost.

Your edits survive it

Anything you pinned or rewrote (a listing’s corrected details, an edited page, an SEO override) carries through a refresh untouched. The refresh updates the raw data around your edits, not the edits themselves.

If credits run low

The schedule pauses rather than failing, and a banner tells you the directory is in a grace period. Top up or resubscribe and it resumes on the next cycle. While a refresh is actually running, content edits are paused for a few minutes so a save cannot collide with it.

Hide a listing

Untick “Show on site” and the business drops off everywhere on the next publish: the listings, the rankings, best-of pages, area counts, and the sitemap. Its own page starts returning a 404. Use it for a business that does not belong, or one that asked to be removed.

Feature a listing

Turn on Featured and set a “Featured until” date. The business gets a sponsored, clearly-labelled placement above the results and on the homepage until the date passes, when it unfeatures itself. The earned ranking underneath never changes, which is what keeps the site credible enough to sell placement on. See section 6 for the pricing side.

Add a current offer

A short free-text line (“10% off first visit”) that shows on the listing.

Override the SEO

Set a custom meta title, meta description, or H1 for a listing when you want to steer how it appears in search. These are pinned, so they survive refreshes.

Add a listing by hand

The build finds businesses automatically, but if one is missing you can add it. Search by name, phone, or a Google Maps share link, preview the match, and confirm for 0.1 credits. You never have to dig up an ID; the search does that for you.

Add listings in bulk

Need more than one or two? The Bulk add button takes up to 50 Google Maps links pasted at once. Every link is checked first for free, line by line: ready to add, already on your site, invalid, or unavailable. You confirm with the exact total in front of you and only pay for the ones that passed. While the batch runs, editing is paused for a few minutes (a banner shows the progress), and the site publishes itself when it finishes, so there is no separate publish step to remember.

Watch for stale pins

If a listing you added or pinned cannot be found live on Google for a few refresh cycles in a row, the row flags it. Usually it means the business closed or delisted itself.

Edit any generated page

Open a best-of, comparison, category intro, area intro, methodology, or the homepage copy and edit its title, meta, description, and body. Your edits are pinned, so a later refresh will not overwrite them.

Curate a best-of list

Control which businesses make a best-of page and the order they appear in. Removing and reordering is free. Adding a new pick that needs its own write-up costs 1 credit, because the engine writes the entry.

Add a comparison page

Spin up a new head-to-head comparison for 1 credit. You can delete pages you created; engine-made pages you delete stay gone through refreshes too.

Edit your About and guides

The About page and the buyer-guide and blog articles open in a full editor and commit to your site’s own repo. Remember that the buyer-guide library is written on the refresh cycle after launch, so a brand-new directory not showing guides yet is normal.

Rewrite the legal pages

Every directory ships with a privacy policy and terms page written around your publisher identity, not ours, and they read differently on every site by design. If you want your own wording (or a non-English version), open them in the editor and rewrite freely: your version is never overwritten by a refresh.

Tune the free tools

If your directory shipped with calculators or tools, you can edit their copy and turn individual tools on or off. The formulas themselves stay managed for you.

Featured placement

Set the price you charge for a featured slot. You apply the actual placement per business on the Listings tab (section 4); this is where you record what it sells for.

Partner quote routing

Route the quote requests from a given category or area to a specific partner business. Useful when you have a paying partner who wants the leads from “plumbers in the north side”.

Banner ads and media kit

Enable banner slots and set the prices that appear on your site’s advertise page, so a business owner can see what a placement costs without emailing you first.

Rename the directory

The name is editable here. It feeds your page titles, structured data, and branding, so treat a rename as a real brand change rather than a casual one, but it is no longer locked at creation.

Brand, publisher, and trust

Swap logos and favicon, and edit the full publisher block: operator name, about, contact, editor, social links, and the sponsorship-disclosure flag. See the branding guide for what to put here.

Contact channels and lead capture

Toggle the WhatsApp and call buttons, turn the listing-page enquiry form on or off, set your lead thank-you message, and adjust the labels used on listing pages.

Tune the enquiry funnel

The site-wide enquiry form writes its own wording for your niche: a trades directory asks for quotes on a job, an apartments directory asks about availability. Here you can override any label on that form, and the funnel page URL while the site is still pre-launch (once it is live and indexable, the URL locks so a published link never breaks). Not happy with the AI’s vocabulary? Regenerate lead funnel re-rolls it and rebuilds, free.

Analytics and spam protection

Add your GTM container, GA4 ID, and custom head or body scripts, and switch on Cloudflare Turnstile to keep spam off your forms.

Connect your domain

The custom domain panel is here. Add your domain, set the CNAME record at your registrar, and verify. Until a real domain is connected, the site stays on its pages.dev address and is hidden from search engines on purpose. The DNS steps are the same as any LocusPilot site; the custom domain guide has per-registrar instructions.

The danger zone

Deleting a directory removes the live site and its whole lead and click history for good, and the site slot goes into a short cooldown. There is no undo, so it is gated behind a confirm.

Where the email notification goes

When a lead comes in, the alert email goes to the publisher contact email you entered on the wizard’s publisher step. If you left that blank, it falls back to your LocusPilot account email. This is set once when the directory is built, which is a good reason to put a real inbox in the publisher step.

The contact page feeds the same inbox

Every directory now has its own /contact/ page with a form for the site itself: businesses asking to be listed, correction requests, advertising enquiries. Those come into the same leads inbox tagged as contact-page messages, so you can tell a consumer quote request from a business owner wanting to talk to you. The footer links there instead of printing your email address into every page, which keeps it away from scrapers.

Change who gets notified

The recipient lives under Portfolio → Managed sites, not the directory’s own Settings. Your directory appears in that list on its own; open its lead settings and edit the notification email (you can add more than one). Changing the publisher contact email on the directory does not move the notifications, so this is the screen to use.

Already in your portfolio, at no cost to your plan

Every directory is added to Managed sites automatically when it builds, so lead capture and click tracking work from day one. It does not count against your plan’s managed-site limit; directories have their own separate allowance. From Managed sites and the portfolio dashboard you can read a directory’s leads and click activity exactly like any single business site you enrolled. The lead capture guide covers the managed-sites screen in full.