A website, a search listing and a directory profile can look almost identical from the outside: a business name, a phone number, a few photographs, maybe a review score sitting next to them. What they are underneath is not the same thing at all, and that difference decides who can change what appears, and who can take it away.

The website is the one you hold

Your website lives on a domain registered in your name (or your business's name), built from pages whose wording and photographs you control. Nobody else can rewrite what it says or decide to remove it. What it needs to carry, and who is responsible for keeping it current, is a matter settled between you and whoever built it (see What a Trade Website Has to Carry Before Anybody Rings and Why a Trade Website Stops Being Any Use).

The search listing is generated

A search listing, the box with your business name, opening hours and a map pin that appears when someone searches for a trade in their area, is put together by the search engine from information it has gathered, your website among other sources. Keeping your website accurate gives the search engine correct material to work from, but you don't write the listing yourself, and the search engine can change its layout or the rules behind it without asking anyone.

A directory profile belongs to the directory

A profile on a trade directory sits on the directory's own domain, under the directory's own formatting and rules. You can usually add a description, some photographs and reply to reviews, but the page itself is the directory's property. If the directory changes its pricing, its ranking criteria, or closes down, the profile goes with it.

Knowing which of the three is actually yours is what tells you where the work of keeping information accurate is worth putting.

A directory profile is a page inside someone else's platform. The categories, the text boxes, and the layout are fixed by whoever built the directory, and that limits what you can actually say there.

The wording is fixed by the platform

Most directories give you a short description field and a set list of trade categories. That field will not let you state a scheme registration number the way the scheme itself requires, and it will not let you set out the areas you cover with the precision a job further from base needs. See Your Scheme Registration and What It Lets You Say for what that wording has to include, and Areas Covered, and the Page That Is Wrong the Moment the Van Goes Further for why a fixed list of towns stops being accurate.

Photographs and reviews stay with the account

Photographs uploaded to a directory profile sit on that platform's servers, under that platform's terms. Reviews collected through a directory work the same way: they belong to the listing. If the account closes, or a subscription lapses, both the photographs and the reviews usually stay locked to that account. There is no general right to take them with you, and no guarantee they can be recovered later.

A website avoids that problem because the photographs and the reviews sit on something you control. Reviews and What You May Do with Them covers what you can say about reviews you collect yourself, and how that differs from reviews sitting inside a directory listing.

The listing or the profile is rarely the whole of it

A search listing is the short entry a search engine puts together for a business: a name, an address, sometimes a phone number, built from whatever information the search engine has gathered and shown in its own format. A directory profile is a page on a trade directory, built to that directory's own template and carrying whatever fields the directory allows a business to fill in. Either one can be the first thing a customer sees, well before they reach the business's own website.

What the customer does next

A customer who has found a name through a search listing or a directory profile usually looks further before they ring. That is what the website is for at this point in the search: it is the page they reach to see the detail that a listing or a directory format cannot hold, things like the scheme registration a business carries, the areas it actually covers, and photographs of work it has done. None of that fits inside a directory's fixed fields or a search engine's short snippet.

The website is the one page the business controls

A search listing is generated by the search engine and can change without the business touching anything. A directory profile sits inside a platform the business does not own and cannot fully edit. The website is the one place where the business decides what appears and in what order, which is why the details covered elsewhere on this site, such as what a trade website has to carry and how a scheme registration should be described, belong there.