Directory and listicle placements
Six to eight of the ten page-one slots on the Denver and Boulder terms belong to directories and roundups. No amount of on-page work displaces them. This is the measured list of which platforms hold those slots, what each one actually costs, and what moves position inside it. Companion to The SERP Teardown Method, section 6.
01
Every cached SERP from the keyword research was re-scanned and re-classified. This is not a list of directories worth being on in general. It is the list of platforms that are, right now, occupying page-one positions on the terms you are targeting.
| Platform | Type | Keywords held | Best position | Cost to enter | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| agencies.semrush.com | Vetted listing | 7 | 1 | $90/mo | Declined |
| clutch.co | Directory | 5 | 6 | Free tier, paid $1,500+/yr | Free tier now |
| designrush.com | Directory | 4 | 5 | Free | Do first |
| builtincolorado.com | Editorial roundup | 3 | 1 | Annual recruitment subscription | Skip |
| yelp.com | Directory | 3 | 5 | Free | Cheap, do it |
| bbb.org | Directory | 1 | 7 | Accreditation fee | Later |
| crunchbase.com | Directory | 1 | 9 | Free | Ten minutes, do it |
| hridoychowdhury.com | Personal roundup | 1 | 4 | Outreach | Email the author |
| jetrank.com | Agency roundup | 1 | 10 | Outreach | Email the author |
| indeed.com | Job board | 1 | 8 | n/a | Not applicable |
The July handoff named BuiltIn Colorado, Clutch and Taylor Scher's roundup as the targets. The measurement says otherwise. DesignRush holds four slots and was missing from the list entirely. Built In, which was ranked top priority, turns out to be the wrong door. Semrush measured as the single biggest lever, and Annette has declined it on 26 July 2026: she does not use the Semrush toolset, and being badged a Semrush Agency Partner while not using Semrush sits badly with a business built on proof. That is a coherent call, and it costs seven keyword slots. The four free platforms still cover thirteen slots between them. See sections 03 and 06.
02
Semrush, Clutch, DesignRush and Yelp are four separate companies with four separate algorithms. They agree on one thing. Every one of them ranks profiles substantially on client reviews, and three of the four weight verified or externally sourced reviews above self-reported material.
That makes the highest-leverage action here not a submission at all. It is assembling a small set of real, attributable client reviews you can deploy across every platform at once. Semrush blends in your Google Maps rating directly, so a review left on your Google Business Profile does double duty.
Three to five genuine reviews, gathered once, raise your position on four platforms simultaneously and feed the local pack that section 7 of the method covers. Every hour spent on profile copy before those reviews exist is an hour spent on the second most important thing.
This section originally named Bone Voyage as the obvious first ask. It is not available. Annette was the director of Bone Voyage Dog Rescue, so a review from it would be her reviewing her own work. That is a conflict of interest under Google's review policy, and Clutch verifies the client relationship by interview, so it would fail there and could put the profile at risk. The same rules out adoption.com and AjijicRelocationGuide, both of which she owns.
Bone Voyage is still fully usable as a case study. It is her own work, disclosed as her own work, and the numbers stand. Only the review channel is closed. Keep using it in profile copy, portfolio entries and roundup pitches, which is where it was doing the real work anyway.
That leaves a genuine constraint worth stating plainly rather than working around: the reviewable client base is thin right now, and directory position is largely a function of reviews. The free listings are still worth claiming, but they will sit low until real third-party reviews accrue. That is a timing problem, not a reason to skip them.
The free Visibility Snapshot is the review engine, and it is already built. Every recipient gets a real deliverable, a graded snapshot and a Loom walkthrough, whether or not they ever pay. That is a genuine service experience, and it is honestly reviewable by someone who is not Annette. A snapshot recipient who found it useful can say so on Google, DesignRush and Yelp today. Clutch is the harder one, since its analyst interview is pitched at paid engagements.
HourHound is the nearest live example: Ben received a week-one snapshot, which is a real deliverable from an external party. Worth asking.
03
Annette does not use the Semrush toolset and is not paying $90 a month to be listed by it. Kept here with the numbers intact so the decision can be revisited on evidence rather than re-researched from scratch.
Seven keywords, several at position one. It behaves less like a directory and more like a high-authority subdomain that Google trusts on agency queries. It is the largest single lever measured, and it is the only one that requires a subscription.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Cost | $90 per month. Mandatory. There is no free listing tier. |
| Where | semrush.com/agencies/get-started |
| What ranks you | The Agency Score, which blends profile completeness, Semrush Academy certification, Toolkit Proficiency exams, and reviews |
| Review sourcing | Blends platform reviews with your Google Maps reviews, so local review work counts here too |
| Certification | Not mandatory but explicitly raises the score. The "Semrush for Digital Agencies" exam plus one Toolkit Proficiency exam |
| Effort to top score | Roughly a day of exams plus a few hours of profile work |
The exams are the unusual part, and they favor you. Most agencies paying $90 a month never sit them, which means a scored ranking factor is sitting there uncontested for the price of a day's study. You have taken harder exams.
Semrush filters on services, industries, budget per project and location. Your Sprint sits at $4,500 and Monitoring at $1,500 a month, so the budget band matters more than the service list for lead quality. Do not tick PPC. It is explicitly out of scope and ticking it invites briefs you will decline.
04
Four keywords, best position five, and a free listing tier with merit-based organic ranking. Paid sponsorship exists and buys category position, but organic placement is scored separately and independently of spend.
DesignRush publishes its ranking methodology, which is unusually honest of them and useful to us. The Organic Score rewards specialization over breadth. Agencies pick up to ten Top Services, then Areas of Expertise beneath them, then up to ten Industries, and are ranked higher within the narrow categories they have declared as their focus.
A generalist Denver agency ticking every box gets diluted across fifty categories. You are a specialist in a narrow, named thing. Declaring three or four services rather than ten is the correct play here, and it is the opposite of what most listings do.
Their published profile requirements: a complete agency overview, high-quality visuals, at least ten portfolio projects, team bios, focused services rather than an exhaustive list, and client reviews. The ten-project minimum is the one real obstacle, and it is a decision point, see section 10.
05
Five keywords, best position six. Clutch sells paid tiers, reported at roughly $1,500 to $1,800 a year and upward, and it does allow paid placement to influence position. That pricing comes from a competitor's comparison page rather than from Clutch directly, since Clutch does not publish rates publicly, so treat the exact figure as approximate.
The part that matters more is free. Clutch's real currency is phone-verified client reviews. An analyst interviews your client and publishes the transcript. A profile with three verified reviews outranks an empty paid profile, and buyers reading Clutch know the difference.
Paying for placement before you have verified reviews buys visibility for a profile that converts badly. Claim the free listing, run two or three review interviews, then decide whether the paid tier is worth it against real numbers. That decision gets easier once you can see what the free profile actually delivers.
06
This one was top of the previous priority list, and it holds position one on your best keyword, so it deserves a clear explanation rather than a quiet removal.
The ranking page is 12 Denver SEO Agencies To Know, and every agency in it links to a Built In company profile. The article is assembled from their company directory, so the profile is the gate, not the article.
The problem is what that profile is for. Built In is a recruitment marketing and employer branding platform, not an agency directory. Company profiles exist so software engineers can evaluate you as an employer. Their packages are annual subscriptions sold to enterprises hiring hard-to-fill tech roles, and the "one roundup per quarter" editorial placement is a Content Studio benefit bundled into the mid and upper tiers.
To get into an SEO agency listicle, you would buy an annual recruitment-marketing subscription aimed at companies hiring engineers, for a consultancy that is not hiring engineers. The article itself dates to 2019 with a partial refresh around 2022, and several listed agencies have since gone quiet. This is the highest-ranking slot on the list and it is still the worst purchase on it.
Worth one cheap test rather than nothing at all: their author, Anthony Corbo, is a real Built In staff writer with a byline. A short, genuinely useful pitch costs an email. Expect little, since the roundup is tied to the paid product, but the downside is fifteen minutes.
07
Three keywords, best position five, free to claim. On its own Yelp is a modest win for a B2B consultancy, and the leads it produces skew smaller than your Sprint price point.
It earns its place for a different reason. The Denver teardown found a local pack on the main target term, which means part of that SERP is a proximity and prominence contest rather than a page contest. Yelp, Google Business Profile and consistent name, address and phone data across directories all feed that side of it. Claiming Yelp is fifteen minutes and it is one of the citation sources that reinforces the local signal.
Crunchbase is the same shape of task: free, ten minutes, one slot, no ongoing cost.
08
Directories have algorithms. Roundups have authors, and that is a much easier problem. Two showed up in the scan holding real positions, both small enough that a person reads the inbox.
| Roundup | Term held | Position | Route in |
|---|---|---|---|
| hridoychowdhury.com | AI SEO consultant Front Range | 4 | Independent writer, direct email |
| jetrank.com | SEO consultant Boulder | 10 | Agency-run roundup, direct email |
The pitch writes itself, and it is the same asset the teardown identified as your differentiator. Not one page ranking on these terms shows a named client outcome with real numbers. You have a rescue that went from a domain rating of 12 to a peak of 62 with zero ad spend, and four thousand dogs placed. That is a concrete, checkable, unusual story, and roundup authors want exactly that because it makes their piece better than the twelve identical ones next to it.
Chris Raulf at boulderseomarketing.com ranks first on seven of the eleven Boulder and Denver terms measured, including every AI and GEO variant. Roundup authors covering AI SEO in Colorado already know who he is. Lead with the measured case study, not with positioning language, because the positioning ground is taken and the evidence ground is not.
09
Written once, in your voice, to be pasted into all four platforms. No marketing register, no em dashes, contractions throughout. Trim to fit each field limit.
SEO and AI search visibility for Front Range businesses. Ranking sites since 1995. Every case study is a property I built and ranked myself.
I've been ranking websites since 1995, when I founded adoption.com and worked out what ranked by reading server logs. SEO Believer applies that to Front Range businesses: a baseline, a hypothesis, a protocol, and one number we're trying to move. My background is medical technology and biochemistry, which is why the work looks more like a lab notebook than a marketing plan.
I've been ranking websites since before most SEO consultants were born. In 1995 I founded adoption.com, back when AltaVista was new and the phrase "search engine optimization" didn't exist yet. I figured out what made pages rank by reading server logs and watching traffic patterns.
My academic background is medical technology and biochemistry, with a BS from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. That training is why I work the way I do: form a hypothesis, test it, measure the result, throw out what doesn't work. SEO is a field where the incentives push toward confident-sounding guesses, so measuring things is most of the advantage.
The clearest proof is Bone Voyage Dog Rescue. It had drifted at low authority for years. About a year of focused work took it from a domain rating of 12 to a peak of 62, ranking nationally for the words that matter, and helping place more than four thousand dogs into homes. No paid advertising, built on earned press and original research.
I work with Front Range businesses on organic search, local and Maps visibility, and being the source that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews quote. I start every engagement with a free Visibility Snapshot, so you can check my work before we ever talk. If I don't think I'm a fit, I'll tell you that too.
Declare few. DesignRush ranks specialists above generalists, and the others reward focus for lead quality even where they don't reward it algorithmically.
Do not tick: PPC, paid social, advertising, web development, branding. PPC is explicitly out of scope, and the rest invite briefs you'd decline.
Nonprofit, health and wellness, professional services, and local and small business. That set matches the real case studies and the wellness AI service line, and it avoids claiming verticals you have not worked in.
10
I've taken this as far as it goes without you. These four change what gets submitted, and two of them involve money or your credentials, which I won't touch.
| Decision | Why it matters | What I'd suggest |
|---|---|---|
| It was the only mandatory spend, and the biggest lever | Declined 26 July 2026. Annette does not use the toolset. Costs seven keyword slots, and keeps the placement strategy entirely free | |
| Team size, and how you present | Every platform asks. Your site says "I". Your notes say present as a company, but only claim the team once genuinely retained | Answer honestly at the smallest band, usually "1 to 9". It's true either way and it survives scrutiny |
| Ten portfolio projects for DesignRush | Their published guidance asks for at least ten. You have a small number of deep case studies, not ten | List what's real, including your own properties, which genuinely are projects you built and ranked. Do not invent client work to reach ten |
| Who can actually review you | Directory position runs on reviews, and everything you own is disqualified as a self-review | Name the clients you are working with now, plus whether Ben at HourHound is fair game. Then route every future Snapshot recipient into a review ask |
I won't create accounts, enter payment details, or submit forms on your behalf. Those need your credentials and your explicit go-ahead, on your screen. Everything up to that point, the copy, the taxonomy, the outreach drafts, is done and waiting.
11
Six of the ten page-one slots on your best keyword are unwinnable with a page. With Semrush declined, four free platforms still hold thirteen slots across the measured terms, and claiming them costs nothing but a couple of hours. Position on them will lag until reviews exist, so the honest sequence is claim now, review over the next quarter, measure in thirty days. That is not a content strategy and it will not feel like SEO, and it is still the highest-leverage move available on these terms.