How to get your SaaS listed in directories without losing a week to it

Every few months someone posts a spreadsheet of four hundred directories and the replies fill up with makers promising to work through it that weekend. Almost nobody does. The ones who try usually stop around number twelve, because by then they have typed the same description eleven times and watched three sites reject it for reasons they cannot see.

The problem is not effort. It is that most people start submitting before they have anything to submit.

Prepare the asset pack first

Before you open a single submission form, write these once and keep them in a file you can copy from. Every directory worth being on asks for some subset of the same things.

• A one-line description, under 180 characters. Not a slogan. Say what the product does and who it is for. "Invoicing for freelancers who bill in three currencies" beats "Invoicing, reimagined."
• A long description, 350 to 2000 characters. Original prose about your product, written once, not spun from your homepage.
• A square logo, PNG or SVG, at least 256 by 256. Transparent background. Not a screenshot of your header.
• Two or three screenshots that show the product doing its job, not the marketing site.
• A canonical URL that loads fast and does not redirect. Directories fetch it.
• Your social links, in full https form.

That pack takes about ninety minutes to assemble properly. It then serves every submission you make for the next year. Compare that to writing a fresh description at midnight for each site, badly.

Write the long description once, and write it yourself

This is the part people rush, and it is the part that decides whether the listing is worth having.

A directory listing that repeats your homepage copy verbatim is a duplicate page. Search engines already have your homepage. They do not need a second copy on someone else's domain, and directories that carry thousands of those pages tend to disappear from results, taking your listing with them.

So write something that only makes sense for your product. Name the specific problem. Say what it does not do. Mention the thing a competitor does that you deliberately skipped. That last one is the single most useful sentence you can write, because it is the sentence nobody else can copy.

If you are stuck, describe the product to someone who asked what you have been working on, and then write down what you actually said out loud. That version is almost always better than the one you would have typed.

How to tell a real directory from a link farm

Not every listing is worth ninety seconds, let alone ninety minutes. A few things separate the ones that will still exist next year:

• Is there a human in the loop? Sites that publish anything, instantly, are optimising for volume. Volume is what gets a directory deindexed.
• Are the listings written, or scraped? Open five listings. If they read like meta descriptions pulled from the products' own pages, that is a scraper with a submit form.
• Is the pricing honest about what you get? "Pay for a dofollow link" is selling you a link, and selling links is against Google's guidelines. That is a risk you are taking on, not a service you are buying.
• Does anything actually happen after publication? Traffic, votes, comments, anything. A page that nobody visits is a page nobody visits, whatever its domain rating.

We run the directory you are reading this on with a person checking every submission, and it costs nothing to be listed. We also make every outbound link nofollow by default, which we explain properly in our post on whether directory backlinks still work.

Submit in one sitting, in order

Once the pack exists, work in a single block of time and go in descending order of usefulness: the directories your actual customers read first, general startup directories second, and the long tail only if you enjoy it.

Fill in every optional field. It sounds tedious and it is, but the optional fields are usually the ones that make a listing rank for something specific: the tags, the category, the maker name, the alternative-to comparison. A half-filled listing is a listing that only ranks for your brand name, and people searching your brand name already found you.

What to do after

Give it a fortnight, then check whether anything arrived. Most directories will send you nothing. One or two will send a small, steady trickle of people who were specifically looking for what you built, and those are the ones to keep updated when you ship something significant.

If you want to start with one that is read by people rather than crawlers, submit your tool here. It takes a few minutes, we draft the listing from your page so you are editing rather than writing from scratch, and a person reads it before it publishes.

You can see what published listings look like on the launches board, or browse by category to find where yours would sit.