The BizHWY Business Directory allows any business in the United States to list their basic contact information and a link to their website for free. The top level of the directory is a link to each of the 50 states with all the cities of any size being the first level subcategories nested beneath each state.
Business categories and subcategories are then organized under each city. This is different than most local and/or regional directories that usually start with the business categories at the top level. There is also an option to start your browsing by city.
Although the logo is cute, the BizHWY Business Directory's design and layout is very busy and cluttered. There is too much going on to easily find what you are looking for. Furthermore, there is a thin horizontal Google Adsense ad at the top that looks like it could be the navigation menu for the site. This is probably fooling a lot of people. This is most likely intentional as the site seems designed mostly to make money for the site owner. There are 5 to 6 vertical columns of information on the homepage.
This also makes it difficult to figure out exactly what the site is actually about. In fact, it almost seems like the directory portion of the site is actually an afterthought with the emphasis being placed more on money making opportunities for the website owner.
The sites seems to highly target the lucrative business of incorporating a new business, advertising for selling a business, those looking to buy a business, and paid press releases. There are also three Google Adsense blocks on the homepage displaying more ads all targeting the user who wants to set up a new business or looking for business opportunities.
The BizHWY Business Directory states that the purpose of the listing in their directory is for indexing the business in the search engines. This is a truthful declaration because it is very doubtful that anyone actually uses the BizHWY Business Directory to find a business in a particular geographic location.
For starters, if you try to work your way from a specific state on the homepage, it takes several clicks to find the city, the category of the business, and then the appropriate subcategory. It would be much more efficient to simply use Google and do a search or better yet pull up a map of the city in Google map and then do a keyword search or use Yelp. I worked my way through to the "Dallas Texas Food and Beverage - Baked Goods Businesses" and found one baked goods company listed for Dallas. Using Google Map, I found many more.
The BizHWY Business Directory does do a good job at optimizing the title of their subpages. The title of the page for bakeries in Dallas Texas was "Dallas Texas Food and Beverage - Baked Goods Businesses." However, when I decided to see how this would rank in Google, the results were not great.
For example, a search for "Dallas Texas baked goods" found the page I found in the BizHWY Business Directory Dallas bakeries page to be ranked 398th in a United States Google search. Very few people surf through this many Google results.
