How We Built the Largest Directory for Minority-Owned Businesses on Long Island
**The Challenge** As the founder of a media platform dedicated to underrepresented communities in Long Island, Miya Jones faced the difficulties of introducing an essential concept to the marketplace. With her first independent project, Shades of Long Island, beginning to thrive, Miya aimed to expand her business and increase its profitability. Despite the growth of her news site, she wanted to introduce a directory feature that would enable local Black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses in Nassau and Suffolk County to be more easily discovered.
**The Strategy** Our team at Blue Surge Marketing Agency, which specializes in advertising and marketing for businesses of all sizes, understands the critical need for visibility. If a potential client or customer is seeking products or services in a particular field, it's essential to be present; otherwise, the opportunity may go to a competitor. Our vision for the directory was to create a comprehensive resource where visitors could effortlessly locate businesses and access key information to make quick decisions about them, such as reviews, images, and operating hours. Once we established the concept, we set about implementing it. We populated the directory with hundreds of listings by gathering data from popular social media platforms, enhancing the on-page aspect of search engine optimization. To test this approach, we added our own business as a sample listing in the directory. Within just a few weeks, a simple Google search revealed that the guide ranked in the top 10 results for our branded keyword. This high placement confirmed that our hypothesis was correct. Additionally, by preloading the directory with listings, we created an incentive for business owners to claim and update their listings, which could only be done after setting up a user account. The efforts of our website design team led to strategies that demonstrated significant growth for Shades of Long Island.