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.

Show staff names for one business

This checkbox only appears when your content policy hides staff names site-wide (section 9). When a business gives you permission to name its people, tick it and publish: the review-sourced staff details return on their page while every other listing stays anonymous.

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.

Write your own review on a best-of page

Click the write-up chip beside any business on a best-of list and the card opens for editing: the label chip, what it is best for, why you picked it, what’s good about it, and what to watch out for. The boxes come prefilled with the text your site wrote, so you are editing a draft rather than starting on a blank page. Only the boxes you actually change are kept as yours; the rest keep updating on their own at every refresh. It is free, and it goes live on your next publish.

Write-ups belong to one page, not to the business

A business that appears on three of your best-of lists has three separate write-ups, one per page. Rewriting its card on your “best emergency vets” list leaves its card on the main ranking untouched. That is deliberate: the reason a business earns a place on a specialist list is rarely the reason it earns a place on the headline one.

Putting the automatic text back

Every box has a reset link. Clear it and the card goes back to what your site writes for that business, and stays in step with future refreshes. Two cases where reset gives you something shorter than what was there before: a business you added to the list by hand, and any list you created yourself. In both, the original write-up only ever existed as a one-off, so resetting falls back to a plain line drawn from the business’s reviews rather than the fuller card. Businesses your site put on the list itself always get their full write-up back.

The label chip

Up to 40 characters of your own beside a business’s name: “Our pick for families”, “Open on Sundays”, whatever you want readers to notice first. A chip replaces the automatic Top pick or Runner-up flag on that entry, so a card never carries two labels at once. Other entries keep theirs.

Hiding scores or ranking numbers

Two checkboxes on any best-of page control what readers see. Turn off the score and the 0-100 numbers disappear from the table and the cards, while star ratings, review counts and the “How we rank” link stay. Turn off ranking numbers and the numerals go, while the running order stays exactly as you left it. Useful when a list reads better as a shortlist than as a league table. Both settings apply to that one page.

What the page tells readers

When you write your own commentary, the line under the heading says the commentary on the list is editor-written. Scores are never editable, and the page keeps saying so: the number beside a business is the one it earned under your published method. You are adding your judgment on top of the data, not changing the data.

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.

Add a best-of page

Your directory only builds a best-of list for a category that has enough businesses of its own, so a category you care about can end up without one. Add it yourself for 1 credit: pick the category and we write the list, the intro, a write-up for each business, and the FAQ. Who makes the list, and in what order, still comes from earned scores and how relevant the category is to each business. You do not choose the line-up. The picker greys out any category that is too thin or that already has a page and tells you which it is, so the only decision is whether the list is worth having. The page URL is prefilled from the category name and you can edit it before you create the page, which is worth doing if you want a shorter or more search-led address. One page per category. It takes a minute or two to write, appears in the best-of list on this tab, and goes live on your next publish. Deleting one you added is free.

Adding a list on a multi-city directory

A directory that covers several cities does not rank across the whole region: it ranks city by city, at addresses like /shah-alam/best/indoor-courts/. So the panel asks which city the list is for before anything else, and everything after that answers for that city alone. The listing counts, the greyed-out categories and the overlap check all cover only the businesses Google places in that city. Each category can have one list per city, so the same category can run as a separate page in two cities with different businesses on each. Nothing is shared between them: editing or deleting one leaves the other alone.

The overall ranking, if yours is missing

Above the categories sits one more option: the overall list, the “best of” page that covers every category at once rather than one slice of the directory. Your site normally writes this one itself, so most of the time you will see it greyed out as already existing, and that is the healthy state. It opens up when a city never got its own, which happens when the city was too thin at build time and has since grown. This is the one list whose URL you cannot change: your site reserves a fixed address for its overall ranking, and keeping it there means a later rebuild that writes the page itself takes over the same link rather than publishing a near-duplicate beside it. Same 1 credit, same earned line-up.

What the overlap warning means

Sometimes the businesses in the category you picked are largely the same ones already ranked on another best-of page. The picker shows the percentage and names the page they clash with. That overlap is the reason your directory skipped the page by itself: two lists with the same businesses on them read as duplicates, to a reader and to Google. The warning does not stop you. Add the page when the category is a phrase people actually search for, and skip it when the only gain is another URL. You will not see it on the overall list, which contains the businesses from every other list by design.

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.

Rename and reorder your menu

Under Menu / categories you control the site’s navigation. Reword the top buttons (Browse, Cities, Best, More, Compare and the like) in your own voice, and rename, drag to reorder, or hide the category hubs inside the Browse menu. Hiding a hub is nav-only: its page stays live and indexed, it just leaves the menu. Only the menus your site actually has appear, and both editors save as drafts that go live free on your next publish.

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 DNS records at your registrar, and verify. Enter it with or without www and we connect both versions, so the panel hands you two CNAME records: add both and the site answers on either address. 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 it lives

Settings → Advanced → Content policy, and the same two switches appear in the create wizard. Both are off by default. Leave them off and your site publishes exactly as it always has; nothing changes until you opt in.

Hide staff and owner names

Removes the review-sourced “Worth knowing” details that mention staff from every listing page on the next publish. Review summaries written after you turn it on refer to “the team” instead of naming people.

Grant permission per business

With names hidden site-wide, every row on the Listings tab gains a “Show staff names (permission received)” checkbox. When a business agrees to be named, tick it and publish: their staff details return on their page while every other listing stays anonymous. Untick to hide them again. Nothing is regenerated, so it costs nothing.

Hide negative remarks

Removes the watch-out lists, “think twice if” notes, complaint tags, and per-service caveats from every listing. Scores and rankings are untouched; this changes what the site says, not how it ranks.

Comparison pages are your call

A head-to-head comparison picks a winner, so its verdict is critical of one side by nature. Hiding negative remarks removes those pages too by default. If you would rather keep them, untick “Also hide head-to-head comparison pages” and they stay live with their verdicts as written.

Free and reversible

Both switches are publish-time filters. The full review analysis is always captured and stored, so flipping a switch either way needs only a free publish, and nothing is ever deleted.

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.

Two groups, set separately

The header and hero button is one group; the “get matched” cards and the enquiry blocks at the bottom of category, city, best-of, compare, service and tool pages are the other. A common setup is a call button in the header with the enquiry form still capturing everyone who reads down a page. Each group also takes its own button label.

What you give up by moving them

An enquiry that goes to your own page, your phone or WhatsApp never reaches your LocusPilot lead inbox. You still see the clicks in your click tracking, but there is no lead record, no notification email and no SMS for those. That is the trade, and it is why the two groups are separate.

Your enquiry page stays live either way

Whatever you choose, the enquiry page keeps a working form, keeps its link in the footer, and stays in your sitemap. It carries on ranking and converting the visitors who arrive from search, so switching back later is just another publish.